Building Potting Soil From Scratch

hey it's Jeremy Silva with bilder soil and I'm doing a short video well probably not gonna be too short but I'm gonna do a video with you today on making a potting soil from scratch from your home and the way that we're gonna do it is show you some data and I'll hold this up and I'll kind of zoom in at least get closer so here are 10 different recipes that we sent to the Logan labs on July 3rd it looks like 2018 and what we did is we took different percentages of peat moss pumice holy mountain fish compost and a local Montrose topsoil we have test data on every individual ingredient but we also want to test how they're combined together as a base and so what I'm gonna do is right now on camera tell you the generic recipe we've all been given and loosely followed and then I'm gonna show you the test results on how these percentages played out we're gonna pick one that looks pretty good and we're gonna embellish a little bit by adding a couple of organic soil amendments and I'm gonna make the potting soil right here I'm only gonna make about 10 gallons because that's all I need and we're gonna do an Instagram and YouTube videos showing these two tents with different grow lights growing the same seeds it's the marshmallow og chem dog D triangle cush and jet fueled gelato and there's 13 seeds in here I'm gonna do 1/2 gallon start since they're feminized I'm just gonna start and a half gallon of soil which means that I need you know 710 gallons of soil to have way more than enough for what I've got going on so that's what I'm gonna do today to start off I'm gonna go ahead and soak these seeds since I'm gonna want to plant tomorrow I like to soak my seeds anywhere from 12 to 24 hours what time is it I think it's afternoon and what to three o'clock right now three o'clock three o'clock okay so if I did 12 hours that's not what three o'clock in the morning and so I'm probably just gonna soak a little bit longer up to 24 hours is probably the maximum I've soaked seeds for 48 they still turn out okay but I don't think it's ideal we want to keep these seeds running the whole way so as soon as they get enough water to soak up the seed and now we're not gonna risk it accidentally drying out in the soil we'll be good to go what I'm gonna do to actually enhance the seeds which you probably don't need - these are freshly made seeds but I just love using hallow that really does help this is what our new label looks like for our aloe vera products pretty soon we're gonna have it on the packaging and go over the directions but let me just open this product right now and this is about a teaspoon per gallon or just a little bit less than that it's kind of the ideal use in those directions on here so I'm just gonna do this it does say to wear gloves and use a mask I don't really pay attention to that when I'm doing small amounts but if you're sensitive you might want to follow that protocol as on the directions so let's see where are the teaspoons here we go all right so there's a teaspoon you can use just a little teaspoon from your from your baking drawer whatever you want to use I happen to have these here I've now got a gallon of water that I'm going to use to wet this soil once I make it and so what I'm going to do is take some of this for now so that I can make a gallon instead of just a shot glass worth so I'll mix this up normally I have like a bamboo stick or something let me see if I can find it I'll be right back all right bamboo stick this stuff if you just let it sit for a few minutes it mixes in a lot easier and the other way to do it is if you're gonna be straining your plants or if you're gonna be watering the plants you can mix a little bit of this yucca extract in there and it definitely makes anything stay in suspension a little bit better and it helps moisten the soil I'm gonna do that but I don't want to soak my seats in the Thermax which is our yucca so I'm gonna do this right before I moisten the soil and I'm gonna stick to the aloe for now so if you look in here you can see that it's starting to get a little bit more golden in color like the aloe vera and it's starting to foam up because there's some SAP in in in the aloe vera but I let this sit for a few minutes it's totally gonna dissolve what I'm gonna do right now is steal a little bit of this so you can zoom back out and I'm gonna take there's what it looks like I'm gonna go ahead and pop my seeds in here and we're gonna soak those until tomorrow and then we'll be ready to go so I'm gonna pop open the seeds dump them in there we go those will be ready for tomorrow normally what I do is I just cover that in foil and I kind of write on there with a sharpie what they are I'll open my kitchen cabinet and I'll just set it in there somewhere dark where it's out of the way so I don't forget about it for here I probably is gonna put this on my desk and cover it so it doesn't get spilt or anything like that tomorrow all right onto the soil recipe the important part obviously you know how to soak seeds but that's the way I like to do it so now I've got about a gallon of water I'm gonna take about 10 gallons of soil I plan to that what I've done I want to water at about 10% by volume which is one gallon of water for ten gallons of soil because it's fairly dry to start and the reason why is I'm using all base ingredients so right now if we go look at these ingredients are these recipes I'm just gonna sit down and you can come closer so you can see recipe one uses 30% sphagnum peat moss and then all the way down at the bottom up to 70% and then different variants of pumice of compost and of topsoil if you look at these recipe one the cation exchange is you know acceptable these are two different tests mainly this alkaline test is determine the calcium difference and the difference in cation exchange because not all the calcium gets adsorbed into the soil right away and it kind of tricks us on the soil test I could do a whole video on just that but you can see the pH is a little high at eight point one main reason is our topsoil that we use that 15% in that recipe is very alkaline it's over eight and it's a high calcium product as far as the topsoil goes your topsoil might be different okay so I have the test results on that topsoil so you can compare now if we look through and you look at the rest of numbers you can see the phosphorus there's no amendments in here so this is just all from compost and soil and peat moss the phosphorus to potassium is kind of inverted you can see here on availability we've got calcium magnesium potassium sodium all pretty much in line here however the pH is just a little high and so we want to work on these percentages a little bit the rest as far as micronutrients goes we can always work on after this is just testing the base alright so now let's go down a little bit there's recipe to similar pH I want to go through all of them so I'm gonna go a little quicker but you can see as we get to higher amounts of peat moss and lower amounts of topsoil the pH starts to drop okay so what I'm going to do is fast-forward ahead and see these recipes and get a little bit further down the line so here's the last one let me see where that's at number ten and that's a 6.2 pH and so you can see the exchange capacity is a little lower so this won't hold a lot of nutrients but it's got a pretty nice pH and then as you look down here what's not available as much which makes sense is that calcium now there is more in the alkaline test as far as percentage so somewhere in here is where the truth lies and we can do the math on that but when you break it all down we're getting a little bit closer let's back it up and look at recipe eight and nine so let's see recipe nine six point six P and we can see calcium a little bit better based on the percentage of topsoil going up and then the magnesium is still a little high okay so let's go down and let's look at the recipe number eight recipe number eight am 6.0 pH that looks pretty good going down here calcium availability is low so we can obviously add calcium to that I really like the starting pH so this is a recipe we could play with let's see you know all of them would be workable realistically especially once we get biology and we add amendments but it's fun to test and see where you're starting at based on the ingredients recipe eight was sixty percent peat moss 30 percent pumice seven percent oli Mountain compost and three percent of our top soil and you know when I ran nitrogen numbers in a few other things on some of these tests in the past they were already pretty high without adding much so you'd be surprised how far really base mix like this will go but then we can add in some amendments so instead of me going off the deep end on soil testing I'm just gonna pick a recipe that has kind of a neutral pH to start with and we're gonna build this one right now if you wanted to follow different percentages you can just start with parts since I'm making 10 gallons I'm gonna call each part ten percent or one gallon so if I need sixty percent that's gonna be six gallons thirty percent is gonna be three gallons and when I'm done I should be left with ten gallons and that'll be more than enough for me so let's go back out I'm gonna put these away right now so the first thing that I'd like to add is the Canadians bag of peat moss this is from premier it's been open in the in the shop here since I did some previous testing so if lost a little bit of its moisture but what I'm gonna do is just start dumping this in my bucket and this bucket which we offer is one of the measuring ones that you can see through so I'm gonna go to a gallon as one but since we need six gallons and this material fluffed up to get to 60% on here for recipe 8 I'm gonna go ahead and probably fill it to three and do that twice that way I'm accurate and I'm trying not to take big chunks because that's a lot more volume it's compressed so as I get it I'm gonna make sure that I run it through my hands like this and make sure that it all fluffs up okay so I'll take this chunk I'll put it in and I'll make sure that I break it up now there's a little bit of moisture as we get deeper in here so it should keep the dust down but you definitely don't want to leave these chunks like that because it's gonna affect your volume and the moisture and everything else now when we make potting soil here we do a really good job of getting his clumps out we have machinery that helps but it's not as good as you putting your hands into it putting your love into it breaking every single clump and expecting every part of the soil as you make it that's the homemade difference I don't care who you are though this one can't keep up with that no company can and I'd like to say that I could and it's damn close but homemade will always trump that just like homemade meal they'll probably always Trump you know something bought at the store now there's some good restaurants out there don't get me wrong but when you serve hundreds of people there's gonna be some variety and when you're a hundred percent in control of that you usually receive the benefits so you're breaking this up let me add some more hopefully I can do a little editing on in the video we can speed this process up but whatever worst case hang out with me we're gonna make some soil a lot of people if you've got sensitive lungs or you don't want to wear a respirator or a dust mask obviously I probably should be too but this is falling straight down we're not doing a lot today and well I'm risking it it's kind of how I roll so maybe you want to do a little differently our guys here when they make this they have full respirators and masks and everything that we wear we have a ventilation systems because when you do something every day it's a it's a world of difference and even a little bit can't affect you so going through breaking up clubs the other thing I can do is once I get it pretty close I'm gonna dump this into my bucket here for mixing so I can kind of double-check all these little clumps and make sure that I've got them on but at least close enough for the volume is what I'm hoping it gets there so it's almost to the three I'm gonna go ahead and get just a little bit more in there and make sure that got the numbers where I want him to be well you can see that it's about it three gallons and that's what I want here's the line so I'm gonna dump that in I'm gonna do one more and then we'll make sure that I break up all the clods in here before we get to that last step and then really even if you add the extra ingredients when it's all mixed at the end you're gonna want to mix moisture through and you'll have another shot to break up all the clothes if you're doing this on the tarp you can use a shovel your feet all sorts of stuff to break up these clumps and make your job a little bit easier obviously if I was making a lot I would just rip open this whole container of peat moss that's been up doing a little bit of time like I'm ninja we're just making 10 gallons and it's pretty easy to dose out that way and keep accurate so I'm just breaking up these folks your peat moss will probably become opened and a little bit more moist you know where you get it from and this might go a little bit faster for you so this is a lot of people's peat moss is pretty acidic and that's part of why the pH drop down there but it's also got a great texture there's a lot of arguments about keep us as far as sustainability the research where we get our feet miles from tanana that use less than 1% of what's available over decades of gardening and it's very tightly controlled we've got some peat substitutes that we'll be using one called pit box but for now we're making the standard recipes that we're all familiar with that work very very well and then we'll play with the alternative recipes and share some of that document with you with that information as we send those beats free soils to the lab but for now there's another three gallons let me make sure I get all the way up to that line I want to make sure I'm out here it here ok looks pretty good now August I can compress this and so I just like to do it like a fluffed volume so I'm measuring the same way all the time cuz it'll compress down a feud with you really put your hands on it all right yo most of the clumps are out now so I'm pretty comfortable going to the next step and then like I said as we add the moisture and everything else I'll go through here with my hands again and make sure that that is completely there's my bucket looks for the next one humus the recipe number a is says 30% three gallons I got a backup on this here we get it straight from the mine it's a pretty good size for what we're doing may not hot enough but this bad boys are sitting here so I think I got another bag somewhere you know what normally I sees pumice and that's great but if you've got the chance to get gross stuff when we offer we actually offer the crust o gs - we just got a truckload of it in and we're probably gonna start using in our recipes so it's a little smaller than this but this is a recycled glass and it's slightly larger than the pumice that we use we have a smaller version of this we're going to start using for everything but it's very effective at holding air as opposed to just draining this holds some air but it's more of a drainage that both hold microbes well but this recycle glass is a killer product so I'm gonna dump that in as a part of my recipe why not I love this stuff we're trying to get mark on here so a little bit more there we go three yawns okay now we're almost there see some dust from all that hummus wetting that down will stop a lot of that dust you know for me even occurring okay so let's see I did the 30% Thomas now we're on to 7% only Mountain compost and 3% topsoil so what I'm going to do is combine these two to get to that one gallon or 10% so let's start with 7% or just under three quarters of a gallon you're accomplished now pull the amount and fish compost it's got a great neutral pH it's got a good balance of NPK it's dark black and rich and it's a lot of high percentage of worm castings in here and so the reason why we use it is it's very duplicate ibly consistent for us if you've got a local compost resource send it off to the lab and see where it's at but if your if your confidence good you can probably follow similar percentages as this recipe because we're only using 7% it's a great amount and it's not going to overdo the recipe of the soil which means it's gonna be more like a high Brix recipe not as much nitrogen more micronutrient trace trace mineral density so let me go ahead and do this and hopefully this is close to three quarters of a gallon I think there's what a gallon or two in here [Applause] all right so that's pretty good obviously I don't want to too much whatever this is how it goes at home to obviously have to sweep after it all right that's a little closer to three quarters of a gallon they mess okay that's less than a gallon there's the three mark as far as quarts so we're very close to the three-quarters of the gallon there and then as far as the topsoil reapers in it so this will get us to the 1 gallon number and then we'll be good don't want to overdo it easy where is it gallon so now I'm the one yelling mark that looks about right okay now there's a couple rocks in here and I like having a couple of rocks in my soil this topsoil everything so it becomes like a real soil instead of a completely homogenized potting soil in here obviously a slightly bigger bucket would be a little easier to work with you can dump it out on a tarp there's a lot of ways to go okay that pretty much covers everything for the recipe those are the numbers that you saw the recipe on as far as the test results now so I've got some big six which is humic acid and six micronutrients I'm gonna go ahead and add a small amount of this in there okay it's like a teaspoon per gallon I'm gonna send some numbers off to the lab and share with you what we find but I'm gonna add two teaspoons to this ten gallons of soil and then I'll probably get some scale numbers and share with you but this is just a little bit extra you can always water that in later pull it all together I was about cracklin this is a really well rounded it's got 13 different ingredients that we carry it builds a soil the list of ingredients pretty extensive but we get such good reviews on this product because it's got everything that we carry here in one bag I'm gonna go ahead and sprinkle this in and since it's more than a cubic foot normally I do like a 1/2 cup to one and a half cups put to your foot I'm probably gonna put a couple here since this is ten gallons and that'll be a little on the high side but a lot of this is rock dust and minerals so it's not all just NPK you know soil amendment type stuff it's got some malted barley all right so let's see bounces we're at 12 ounces I wanted to put 16 so I'll do four more two cups that I talked about or ten gallons dang for hyundai money all right cool so now I've got the extras I've got all of the foods so to speak built in I added a little humic acid with the trace elements micronutrients now this is a silica product made from rice hulls by Grosso and you can water this in later you don't have to add it now but I mean might as well just add a little get a little extra silica in there some of them will be in the topsoil already the other products that I have that are kind of interesting to play with a lot of people add biochar this biochar has already been inoculated with root wise and since I'm just making a potting soil at home a lot of you guys will have some stuff laying around or might want to get the extras I don't want to go above three to five percent with this product and I'd like to usually stay a little lower percentage and so obviously one gallon would be 10 percent a cup would be a sixteenth of that so I'm not adding much I'm going to go ahead and just add a cup of this in here little more so this is going to hope hopefully increase the cation exchange capacity and that will allows there's a cup and that will um allow it to hold some more of these nutrients without them being too much for the soil to hold then it'll slow release back to the plant and it should allow it to be balanced now the other product that I've got here is a premium montmorillonite clay a calcium bentonite calcium montmorillonite we offer this on build a soil and what this does it's got a very high cation exchange again allowing it to hold on to more nutrients but it's also going to increase the water holding capacity so that it doesn't just run out with all that peat moss and aeration in there the peat will hold the water but at the end of the day this will help just a little bit holding on to nutrients and making the texture really nice so Confed up adding a cup I'm probably just gonna do a smaller amount let's say like a half cup of this there's a half and this that's a pretty good soil recipe now you'll notice this isn't our exact formula the recipe that we'd always been taught in the beginning was 1/3 part or I'm sorry 3 ingredients ok 130 so one part peat moss one part pumice or any aeration that you have and another part compost we found that most compost used at bat high of a percentage was more problematic than helpful so we've been adjusting some of our recipes this all e-mount does work really well in a high percentage but we've got to do some other work to balance the rest that's why we have soil building kits this light recipe will work for almost anybody and then you could always add compost teas top dressing all sorts of stuff to it this is a minimalist approach and now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to mix this together a little just pour admire a low one so I'm just gonna dig my hands in here start getting that peat moss worked up in through the aeration obviously I've got to be a little careful so I don't spill it where normally if this is on a big container I could just kind of whip it around you could put it in a big bag and shake it up and there's so many ways depending on how much volume you're making the ideas just get it integrated kind of like dirt baking cookies and making something in the kitchen really is plant fruit itself you want to get it all mixed up nice all right now it's not mixed up yet enough but I'm gonna start integrating a little bit of moisture now that I've got okay you can see that olives fully dissolve because I let it sit in there a little bit like I mentioned and normally what you could do is like take your sprayer and gently sprinkle it and that's great if you've got a big pile but if you're gonna be able to work all of it by hand you just pour it in there since I've done this before I know that ten percent or one gallon to ten gallons is a great number it's not gonna be over water since I've got it in a bucket this peat is kind of dry and normally it's a little hydrophobic and normally I would add that you know yucca in there to help break back I can do that on the next water and since I forgot to dump it in so let me that work this by hand and force all the moisture to be even it's gotta be really nice it's gonna break that hydrophobic tension of the peat moss it'll make it so that it starts absorbing water instead of repelling the water and at that point it's gonna be easy to work with now I'll let this sit overnight and come together you could let it sit a couple of weeks or much longer if you wanted to but I'm gonna use it tomorrow to put my seeds in so I'm just gonna let the moisture kind of humanely come together all overnight fact I'll probably add more moisture but this will be enough to be sorry start to change color moisture starting to come together there you can see the dry spots versus the wet spots and how they're starting to clump together like making this texture it's really nice the smells are coming together starting to be like an actual recipe instead of just ingredients all mixed up and what I'll do is probably mix it one more time tomorrow before I plant it up just to make sure that everything came together I wasn't kind of rushed on the video to speed things up too much Oh check it off what you've been in too small of a container mixing it with what I had here this is going to be fine it's all starting to come together it really nice you can wear gloves if you want this stuff's pretty easy on the hands everybody's different right you can see it looks like a potting soil now it's got a little bit of texture a little bit of moisture it's got compost peat moss topsoil all the stuff that we like to use the plants are going to love it so I'll let this all come together okay what we're gonna do is I'm gonna start a video tomorrow hopes I can upload it in a series so that we can watch along but a minimum will update you on Instagram and I'm going to put all of this soil into these half gallon bags I'm gonna take these seeds that we've germinated in by that time tomorrow those will be sunk to the bottom and we're gonna put them in there I'll put the mulch together and we're gonna put them these grow tents we're gonna turn the lights on we're gonna see how many of these germinate then I'm gonna pick our favorite four and I'm gonna do 30 gallon containers two in each tent well we're gonna do an entire demo and then what I think is I'm gonna take some of these home and I'm gonna run the new LED quantum boards from timber instead of the cobs and CMH cob like you'll see in the next video and I'm gonna do a free wave test now I know it's not from clone but I think we're gonna get some really good information just testing the light with the meters testing the soil showing how the seeds grow throughout the process so you've got any questions go ahead and leave them here on this video you can email support at build our soil calm and we'll be happy to answer them hopefully I didn't skip over anything today I try to be pretty detailed and then I'm gonna hopefully put all these soil tests together so you can kind of see how the recipes correlate as far as a base level of recipe without any agreed Ian's added and then maybe if I've got time I'll send some of this off to the lab so you can see what it looks like with these exact ingredients that I put together anyways stay loyal to the soil and check out publish all calm

Channel: BuildASoil

Views: 73,266

Rating: 4.8536587 out of 5

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Id: Ww25Qthdp3E

Length: 27min 32sec (1652 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 01 2018