How To Re-Use Old Potting Soil - 4 Methods for Recycling || Black Gumbo

hey there welcome to black gumbo southern gardening let's revitalize some old potting soil [Music] so i've been asked the question can you recycle your old potting soil and when is it smart to do so after all if we're growing in containers and and your pots are are your main garden then you know you don't want to be buying soil every single year and throwing out the old stuff that's not economically very very wise nor feasible so i'm going to show you a few methods today on how to revitalize your old potting soil and we're going to talk a little bit about when it's safe to do so and when it's not a good idea and i'm going to give you a few methods okay check out these two pots as examples this pot had flowers growing in it i had several uh three different kinds of flowers some alyssum i don't even know what the rest of this stuff was but i'm pretty sure that these flowers have probably dropped seeds into this soil and i'm okay with that because the the seeds that come up here i might want them i can pull them out and transplant them if they look like they're interesting flower seeds that come up otherwise they're just weeds a weed is any plant that you don't want growing in your soil so yeah this is a candidate for recycling because it was heavily mulched these flowers here were not real heavy feeders and yeah there's roots and stuff all down in there so we'll just clear this out and get the mulch off the top get the snails out and we will recycle this stuff truth be told i recycle almost everything in potting soil the only way the only time that i won't recycle my potting soil is if i had a diseased plant and then i won't recycle the potting soil and by disease i really mean you know a true disease not a pest now some pests you don't want to recycle the soil if you had pests that are soil-borne pests and you'll just have to kind of research uh what what what does the life cycle of the pest that you dealt with but if they overwinter in the soil you might not want to recycle that for a few years uh just let it sit for a while let it sit through a season or put it in a bin a dark garbage can and let it sit in the heat through a summer and that should give you a usable soil this other one here this one has some weeds growing in it but there's not a lot of weeds growing in it so i'll just pick those out and we'll just recycle this as it is because it looks like it's in pretty good shape i don't remember what grew in here but the root system down below there might tell me if it's still there maybe it's composted in place already but this soil looks pretty good and i didn't have any diseases in my potted plants last year or last summer so i can reuse all of this this is the soil that i used in my single seed challenge and you can see the remnants of the rice hull mulch that i used on top now rice hull mulch can also be a substitute for perlite or any other kind of stuff you might add to your soil to give it aeration and so you don't really have to remove your mulch if it's just this this rice hull but i'm going to remove a lot of it but i'm not going to worry about any remainders like that stuff down there there were spider mites on my single seed challenge this year and while spider mites are a pest they do not overwinter in the soil and their eggs don't overwinter in the soil so i can use this soil uh i can reuse it again without worrying about the mites so that's what we're going to do with this stuff now one of the things that you can do with your potting soil especially if you have heavy roots in your soil is to screen that soil into a wheelbarrow or a wagon and i've got this screen this compost screen that i've used and i've shown you how i made this in another video but i'm going to screen some of my soil through here just to take out any of the the bigger roots and every now and then you find a grub in there as well so it comes in handy you don't have to do this but i'm i'm going to screen my soil just to see what's in it that's some nice earthworms in there i don't see any big roots in here and that's what we're looking for big roots big rocks like that take that out big chunks that you don't want passing through grubs pests anything that might be in here that you don't want to put in your new soil now like i said i like to take the mulch off there's not much of this mulch left and the problem with mulch is it's a high carbon material whether it's leaves or wood mulch you don't want that in the midst of your soil while it's a good addition to your compost if you leave it in your soil and mix it in it's going to bind up nutrients as the bacterial life and the fungal life go to work on this they utilize the nitrogen in your soil that the plants need to break this down that's why mulch and leaves and things like that on the surface are fine because that's just on the horizon where that nitrogen is being robbed where the mulch meets the soil but you don't want to mix it in let's see what's in this one all right we've got some mulch down at the bottom hopefully that'll filter out got some roots in here you can see these are the kinds of things you don't really have to worry about if you don't want to these things will compost in place there we go it looks really good doesn't it a couple weeds down in there now there are probably weed seeds all in this but again with mulching you can minimize the germination of your seeds whether it be in a garden bed or in a container the absolute most easy way that you can reuse your potting soil is just to reuse it just plant right into it with whatever you're going to grow in that pot potting soil and most soils while they are depleted by the plants that grow in them usually are not fully depleted for a number of seasons when i do my garden beds i put one layer of compost on them for each time i plant in them and that's pretty much all the amendments my garden beds as a whole get every year they do get spot treatments with liquid fertilizer and slow release fertilizer in the holes when i plant some things sometimes but for the most part all the fertility in my soil in my main beds comes from a twice annual application of about a half inch of compost on the top and that's it that keeps the soil life happy and grows good plants in our pots pots are a smaller sample and sometimes that soil can fill up with roots and those plants can really zap the the soil of its nutrition and so if you're going to plant directly in old potting soil which i don't necessarily recommend but sometimes that's all we got stay on top of those plants as they grow with a very regular and a very good water-soluble fertilizing regiment you want to give your plants the food they need and by fertilizing them you you can help them to grow healthy even in bad soil so that's the first method just use what you got the second method is to add some fresh potting soil to your to your old potting soil i would recommend about a 50 50 mix but do whatever you got what's in the fresh potting soil are some of the amendments they put in there like the compost sometimes there's manure in there this organic stuff has all kinds of good additions to it um that you can read on the package that will help to revitalize your soil now it's not the full strength stuff but it's a way to extend your old potting soil and and that that 50 50 mix will give you at least a boost of of nutrition to help that soil life come alive and give nutrition to your plants again if you're going to do this method also stay on top of your plants with a pretty rig rigorous fertilizer regiment as they grow water-soluble fertilizers are immediately available to your plants and i recommend them the next method i would recommend as we climb up the ladder of fertility i guess you could call it that each method is a little bit better than the previous one instead of just adding potting soil to your depleted potting soil add something with a little more kick i've got here some compost this is finely screened compost that i made this past year and this is good stuff compost is very diverse and well compost depends on what you're putting in it i've put everything but the kitchen sink in my compost and so it's very fertile stuff it's got a diverse bunch of nutrients in it and it's good for the soil and compost pure compost you can grow straight in that but if you add compost to your depleted mix what you're doing is you're putting in organic material into your soil that the bacteria and the fungal life in that soil can go to work on and that's actually what feeds your plants it's not the compost itself the plants eat it's the byproducts of the soil life breaking down your compost they make the nutrients and the elements in that compost available to your plants and so that's what you want you want healthy soil life you don't want just dead soil it's got to be healthy well you got to feed that life and compost is one of the best ways to feed that life so you can put some compost in some depleted soil a ratio of three part soil to one part compost is really all you need and that will help to revitalize your soil and bump up the nutritional value of that soil and make all that soil life happy if you do this method just adding some compost to your depleted soil you could probably get away with growing your plants through their whole life without fertilization although i still like to fertilize especially if i don't have really high quality compost so that's the next method and i'm going to do a little bit of that so i'm gonna take about three gallons of compost you can see that's my finely sifted compost and i'm gonna add it to my soil and mix it in real well but one thing i wanted to show you i had some peanuts get into my compost this year and as the peanuts have uh sprouted i've got these little peanut plants in my compost so interesting huh these are going back into the compost so we can eat these peanuts in our next vegetables that feed off of this stuff okay well that was easy that's revitalized potting soil now it's one part of compost and three parts of depleted potting mix and it looks just as good as store-bought stuff now the addition of compost to that soil will kickstart the biological activity in there but if you really need to use it really quick um one way is to take some compost tea and water that soil saturate that soil with compost tea and that really makes a a really nice potting mix that's ready to plant in right away otherwise you might want to let that soil sit for a few weeks and let that that compost start to break down let that soil life bump up into activity but really it doesn't matter some people say you should wait some people don't i'm gonna wait a little while because i'm gonna put some lettuce in containers and my lettuce isn't ready to be planted up yet so that's why i'm waiting so the fourth method is an attempt to add into the soil a little bit more of what your plants need let's talk about soil briefly what is soil in the ground and in nature soil is a combination of organic material along with inorganic material like mineralized you know silt and clay and sand things that are truly just pulverized rock and in a lot of places that makes up the most of the soil in a forest environment the top portion of the soil is largely organic material that's fallen down from the trees and it's nice and loamy and rich it's got a lot of life in it but dig down and frequently you'll hit the the mineralized portion of the soil which is either sand or is clay or a combination of those lots of silt that's native soil and your plants actually need some of that mineral stuff they need to have some clay they need to have some some some of the minerals that are over time gradually and slowly through chemistry leeched out of that rocky material and so it's a good practice for example if you're making your own compost to throw some clay in it from time to time and let that clay break down in your compost it's a good good deal but if you don't have that kind of stuff on hand you can artificially replicate that and that's what we have to do when we buy potting soil because potting soil is not the earth because the problem with native soil and all that dense mineralized clay and sand it either doesn't drain well or it drains far too fast if you live in a sandy area you know about that it just the water just disappears if you live where i live we have black gumbo clay and the stuff's like plastic like gummy plastic and you can dig a hole and put water in it and come back the next day and it hasn't drained but a millimeter or two it's and that's probably evaporation so you don't want to put that in a pot potting soil is designed to be well draining but also retain water and that's why potting soil is largely made of organic material that retains water if you look on a bag of potting soil like this you'll find that a large percentage of it is some sort of water retention medium like peat moss this stuff is probably half peat moss or more peat moss ground wood coco coir all these things retain water but they also drain well and so you that's what we want for our pots we want to retain water so your plants can survive but we also don't want them getting waterlogged but they still need that mineralization they still need the benefit of native soil so what we can do is we can add that in with fertilizers like azomite which is truly a mineral mixture and this will give your plants um calcium chlorine and sodium and soluble potash a little bit of trace minerals and that's what we're really after is all those trace minerals you can also use kelp meal kelp meal is a good source for minerals the ocean is filled with all these trace elements that your plants thrive on um like molybdenum molybdenum i don't know how to say it i forget i always get confused um sulfurs uh cadmiums all these weird little things that you don't think your plants need but they do well in the native soil the clay and the sands and all that provide that for your plants but in our pots we need to add that in i would also suggest for the very best potting mix that you're going to revitalize to put some slow release fertilizer uh in there and i often use this dr earth's and it's got a whole bunch of good things for your for your plants including bacterial elements it's got several several types of bacterial it's got several types of mycorrhizal uh fungi and this helps to boost your your pla your soil life and after all all that bacteria and that fungus in your soil that's what breaks down the organic material to provide nutrients for your plants and so you want that this stuff has a lot of it in there it's not just npk it's not just npk plus some trace elements it's npk trace elements and mycorrhizal fungus and bacteria that is good for your soil so i'll add about a handful or two of this into the the mix we've just made and that will help to inoculate that soil with the good stuff that we need i'll also add a handful or two of this azomite which will give some of the minerals that our plants need and that soil will be totally revitalized it'll actually be better soil than we bought when we brought one of these bags home from the store because we've taken care to put in the soil what our plants need all right so i'm just going to take a handful and another handful you don't need much of this this azomite just a little bit and then i'm gonna take a couple of handfuls of this dr earth's and i really like this stuff i use this every year it is slow release fertilizer but remember we're inoculating our soil with all that other good life so put that in there mix it in really well use your hands use a tool use whatever you want if you really want to get this going hose it down briefly get it moist don't get it sopping wet just get it moist a little bit that'll wake up all that bacteria and that fungal life in there and this stuff will be ready to plant in a in a couple of days you could plant in it right away if you want i'll show you how to plant i have a couple of brussels sprouts left over two of them in one plug we'll have to thin them can you grow a brussels sprout in a container i've seen people grow them in this size of container so we're going to try it i'm going to put this in here just as simple as that and i'm going to put some mulch over the top of it just to keep the weeds down now brussels sprouts are brassicas they're pretty heavy feeders so all that life that we've put in here is going to wake up and when i water this over the next few days it's going to wake up and start working on that compost that we put in here and really give a good chance for this brussels sprout to get started and to grow nice and large we'll see i'm just reaching behind me and grabbing some of that rice hole off my single seed challenge pot well there you have it what's in this pot is better than what came out of the bag we've revitalized old potting soil saving money but if you just want to cut your soil in half with depleted potting soil a new mix that's one method if you want to add all the fertilizer and good stuff to it that's another method whatever you do you can always reuse the stuff and uh so yeah there you go hey like us on facebook and instagram and if you haven't subscribed to our channel i invite you to do so it means a lot to us we're trying to hit a hundred thousand this spring and uh wow that would be great wouldn't it hey happy gardening to you we'll see you next time bye-bye [Music] you

Channel: Scott Head

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Keywords: Gardening, Vegetables, Texas Gardening, Zone 9a, Black Gumbo, Reusing potting soil, Reviving old potting soil, how to reuse old potting soil, how to revive old potting soil, can you reuse potting soil, can you reuse old potting soil, how to recycle potting soil, saving money in the garden, how to save money in the garden, Frugal gardening, How To Be Frugal in the garden

Id: -RNNQPxnUYE

Length: 19min 53sec (1193 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 27 2020