Bobbie,
I'm not sure how much nitrogen it actually takes away when breaking down so I really don't know.
What we do is take the pine bark and sand and mix together. We were adding lime to help raise the ph since pine bark is a little acidic. Now, since the chicken litter has added calcium and it raises the ph we're not adding lime.
So chicken litter, alfalfa pellets, slow release fertilizer, milorganite, and a little Epsom salt are added and mixed in the planting hole or tilled in, this is where the nitrogen and other nutrients comes into play. We also top dress with some of these also.
We then fertilize with a water soluable fertilizer in a regular basis, once every week or two. I have been told that with our heat, moisture, and rain it's hard to over fertilize here because it gets depleted fast.
When we take everything up in the fall to divide and then replant what we are going to keep back in the beds we add the chicken litter and the other stuff to the hole and as top dress. In the spring we will top dress with more of this. I use a lot of alfalfa pellets so the worms will be happy. So basically twice a year we add the admenments to the beds.
No I don't plant just in pots. The sale plants go into pots when we divide in the fall or if I get something in late spring and I don't have room for it in the bed I will pot it.
