What Should I Buy? Bagged Topsoil, Garden Soil & Potting Mixes: How to Cheaply Make Your Own Mixes!

welcome to the rest of garden homestead today we're going to go over the different bag mixes you can buy because this is where we pay way too much money it's very confusing we're going to start with topsoil on the Left Gardens soil potting mix on the right and right in front there's raised bed mix I'm going to talk about what each of those are for we're get to get in close look at the materials in there so that you have a good sense of what you're buying and at the end of this video I'm going to show you how to make a great mix for your raised beds or your containers at a fraction of the cost so let's just do a quick overview up here you can buy topsoil that's a dollar eighty seven four forty pounds you can buy premium topsoil that's two thirty seven what is that good for pretty much good for filling halls and leveling off your lawn you can use the cheap dollar eighty seven bag of stuff with peat moss I'll show you how I use that to make a really nice container mix and raised bed mix then we get to garden soil garden soil is meant to go in the garden just as it says it's not meant to be used as a potting mix and that's because it doesn't have a lot of peat moss doesn't hold a lot of moisture I've grown in it before it definitely works you can add in peat moss save you some money because garden soil somewhere in the mid cost between the topsoil we just did in a potting soil we're gonna give - that's for twenty seven a bag four point seven cubic feet and then that's three ninety seven for one cubic foot so it's expensive now you get two container mixes potting mix those are those three bags up there and somewhere over the last couple years they decided to create a raised bed mix and that's just peat moss I think shredded would really and as again as we're moving across left we're getting less Earth we reading and shredded hardwood we're adding in peat moss and that's 1.5 cubic feet and that's 797 a bag if you have to use a bag mix that stuff is probably a better value than this other stuff so all three of these products are miracle girl miracle girl corners the market they buy different companies and you just see different names so when you get to potting mix that's eight dollars and forty seven cents 32 quarts basically peat moss and perlite the white perlite you really don't need in your container mixes if you have a lot of peat moss it's kind of like eye candy makes it look like you got something special but I'm gonna show you how to add it into the mix what I'm talking about or that I'm gonna make and show you how to save money that is the higher end I guess in quotes the potting mix that's 1197 for 25 courts right here same company you can get this product on the left 32 courts for 847 they're basically the same don't pay a lot for a gold and black leave it so a Miracle Grow also then has their standard product 25 quarts potting mix 997 really no difference between these three products peat moss mostly some shredded hardwood perlite different fertilizers all the way up starting at a buck 97 for topsoil to a high-end 1197 now let's get in closer so I can just go over what's in them a little bit more so you understand what you're buying so the best way to kind of really know the product is to let them dry this is the topsoil and it's basically dirt and those are wood chips in there if you add water to it it looks darker looks more healthy but it quickly turns to mud so you really want to be careful not to grow directly in your topsoil or the premium topsoil when you have a garden you can use it but you have to amend it with compost peat moss coco coir or coiours I was told it was pronounced so this is the premium topsoil 2:37 and this is where they start removing the earth and start putting in more shredded wood shred as far as three products they call it sometimes more peat moss then you go from your topsoil over to your garden soils and that is more peat more hardwood used for your garden beds same thing as you come up to here this is the other garden soil and you can see pieces of wood in there more peat moss peat moss and when you come over to the raised bed mix this is really just shredded hardwood more finely shredded and a lot of to moss and you know I make this all the time I grow in shredded hardwood I get delivered from a landscape company a lot cheaper then you come over to the potting mix and then you come over to the potting mix and they take out more of the shredded hardwood even though it's in there and they add in a bunch of peat moss and the potting mixes have a lot of peat moss because the potting mix you want it to hold water peat moss holds water it's nice and loose great for your containers and you can use it and you kind of get the sense of the different bag to products okay let's go over to the PMO's let me show you that so peat moss comes in a three foot cubic bale it's compressed when you open this up it fluffs up it's a lot of material and you can see it's nice and fine what does that look like it looks like your potting mix let's slide over there so right next to it I put peat moss and you can see it's pretty similar in structure same thing over here and you get the idea so that 3-foot cubic or yeah that 3 3 cubic foot bear bale of peat moss is twelve to fourteen dollars and that will fill a raised bed that will fill your containers you could grow directly in that forget it and then that up I'll show you basically how to make these potting mix bags I don't want to over exaggerate so let's say we can make them for two dollars a bag actually we can make them for a lot less than that but just don't know the exact price so I'll show you how to make it now coming over here to this raised bed you would have to take all these materials right here not the bale of peat moss but those eight bags and would have to spend a hundred and ten dollars to fill this this is six feet by three feet twelve inches high I have a metric conversion chart in the video description if you want to take a look at that but basically the eight bags materialised saw I showed you it cost me $55 to buy that you would need double that to fill this up to the top it's $110 it's just way too expensive if you wanted to fill a garden like my garden my buying bag stuff it would cost you thousands of dollars I save money by going to a local landscape company I got the landscape company order in a couple cubic yards of shredded hardwood you can get compost that way you can get garden soil that way saves you a lot of money there's a delivery fee but you're buying you didn't bulk and it's a lot cheaper than all of this I highly recommend it that's how I filled a lot of my beds last year but we're gonna go with you can't get to a landscaping company you don't want to pay all that money that becomes you know one pail that money per bag to do stuff so what's the cheapest way to do it get yourself a bit cute yeah get yourself a three cubic foot compressed bag of peat moss if you want to order online some perlite you can to make it look good you don't need that I'm gonna show you how to make those mixes now for your containers and for your raised bed alright so first we're going to make a raised bed mix mace basically if you're going to be growing in the ground will do the container mix next so the cheapest way to do it is to use peat moss and earth from around your area let's say you can't get any earth the 40 pound bag for $8 87 works perfectly fine by itself it's garbage that gets wet it becomes you saw what it dries like so that's about a half a bag in there and the first ratio that I'm going to show you is 5050 and you can change this up however you want you can do more peat moss if you want if you're using your earth and it's better 50/50 might work but you'll get the idea and then when I'm done we'll do the container mix and then I'll also show you how much of this peat moss I used you're gonna be pretty impressed about how cheaply we can make this using that 14 dollar bail so that's about a 50/50 mix and then mix it together obviously alright so that's a 50/50 mix you can see this stuff is already looking better it's not bad maybe you want to add in some more peat moss so we'll go to two-thirds peat moss and then one-third Earth and then we'll mix this together and that's what two-thirds peat moss and one-third Earth looks like now in that we want to add the fertilizer handful of any organic fertilizer it represents n P and K they're all basically the same and you would mix that through so now you have your raised bed mix your garden soil made for a lot less than you're buying it in the bags let me add one more thing to it now you may have access to compost you want compost that's a hundred percent broken down I'm using leaf grow and I'm just gonna toss in a shovel full of the Leafs bro so this would be your compost and we would mix that in now you have a really nice raised bed mix you could also absolutely grow your container mix in here but let's just do a container mix and let me show you the materials I use to make this so we made our garden soil and I'm getting a really venture to say it's maybe $1 worth of material if that much I did bring in my compost that's leaf grow that was five dollars and forty seven cents a bag we used one shovelful used a handful maybe two of the organic fertilizer a couple shovel fulls of the peat moss look how much peat moss is left it's a lot and we ended up making all of this garden soil perfect for a raised bed you could definitely grow your container plants in here it's not much different than we're gonna make in a second and the garden so there is for 27 you get the idea you can make this for a lot less money and you can make a better quality mix using these ingredients okay let's do the container mix all right so this is really worth watching because the potting mixes for 25 quarts to 35 quarts was basically nine bucks to twelve bucks that's not a lot so let's put in a bunch of peat moss all right and then I said if you wanted to you could buy perlite I have a bag it's really inexpensive drop it in throw in a handful or two of your organic fertilizer let's mix that together for part one now when you look at this it looks just like the potting mix I'll bring your bag over that's not quite 25 quarts I like to make it by adding it a little bit of compost it makes it better then the stuff that we buy in a bag just adding a little more to bring it up to that 2535 quartz just about one big shovelful they were too little shovel fulls of compost let's mix that together and we need to add in a little bit of water to make it like the other stuff peat moss is dry it's light it's easy to carry around and you really got to roll the water in point it to that dry just rolling around the clumps get pre-moistened and you get the idea of what we made okay let me get the bag for comparison so this is art container mix fraction of the cost let's go over what I used again you don't have to but I did add in its get in focus did add in some leaf grow 5:47 we have all that left that's my compost of the fertilizer that was probably six dollars we have a lot left in there the peat male I don't know why I can't say that the peat moss Bale still have tons of peat moss left left and right in there is a big bag of perlite I bought before and it's really inexpensive I mean I think that was like 40 quarts and it was $20 and I've had it for years you just don't use it that much but we can make a really nice looking container mix potting mix got all that quantity for a lot cheaper than buying it for 12 bucks hope you enjoyed the video give you some confidence in selecting the right products making your own products and I hope you have a wonderful year please check out my seat shop at the rusted garden calm and please subscribe to my channel and if you have a chance please watch the ads that run another a pain but I do spend a lot of money like I'm not going to use all this stuff here cost me fifty five bucks glad use it in a video but watching the ads does help me out thanks so much for watching

Channel: Gary Pilarchik (The Rusted Garden)

Views: 69,721

Rating: 4.9541931 out of 5

Keywords: Vegetable, Gardening, Organic, Homesteading, sustainable, off grid

Id: co3NlAJYc48

Length: 15min 16sec (916 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2020