Dave's Ultra-Concentrated Compost product reviews

I'll be honest, I had never even heard of Humates before I ran into this stand at Fieldays earlier this year. I had plans to set up a new planter, but due to circumstances beyond my control the new planter never arrived. Thus, I had to work something out myself. Because I didn't want to leave this any longer, I got stuck in and set up a few seedling pots - half with plain soil, half with 90% soil and 10% Dave's humate compost mix. Into each, I jammed some freshly-germinated seeds from an "assorted peppers/capsicum" packet. Turns out, every plant that broke soil was a pepper... so at least that made things easy to do a straight comparison.

From the earliest, I could tell that the Dave's compost was doing a great job, because all of the plants in those pots were sprouting faster, and a few were putting out flowers far earlier than I would have expected. Fast forward a few more weeks, and you can imagine my surprise to discover small fruit appearing on the Dave's plants before the "regular soil" plants were even flowering! The photo linked ot this review shows two seedlings of the same age, the one on the left is growing in regular soil while the one on the right is growing in soil with Dave's compost included... and it has quite an impressive fruit on it already.

Alas, due to the horribly mixed weather, all the plants were losing leaves so I had to move them all indoors, which has slowed down growth a little, but the ones with the Dave's mix are still outperforming the plants growing in regular soil. When the weather improves a bit, I plan to put them all outside in a raised garden bed, which will have at least 20% Dave's mix in it, so I expect them all to take off pretty quickly.

Overall, is this a worthwhile product? To me, I can't see why everyone isn't using it by default. At less than $2/kg it's more expensive than regular compost, but the benefit to the plants is undeniable, which makes it well worth the cost, in my mind at least. WOuld I recommend it to others? Yes, I have done so and will continue to do so, often and vocally. In fact, when I renovate the main garden next year, I plan to buy another couple of bags and really load it up.