Making Potting Soil | Live Free or Die: How to Homestead

We're making some potting soil today, and any good potting soil meets three criteria: it retains moisture for a long time, it drains well, and it has enough fertility to get the plants off to a good start in life.

If you grow out a lot of potted plants every year, like we do, you could wind up spending hundreds of dollars a year on good potting soil. It's good to learn how to make your own soil.

We're gonna start this potting soil out with a bucket full of sand. Got to have sand in your potting soil to make sure it drains well. Next, what you want to do is pile up a bunch of leaves or wood chips. You let them rot down for a year or two, and you scrape off the top, and you'll see some nice black stuff underneath. This is the component of the mixture that's gonna hold a lot of water.

The sand and this woody organic matter provides a nice, airy substrate for the plant to hang out in, but it provides little fertility. We got a secret ingredient that provides the fertility that this material is lacking.

All right, on to the next step! Now, time for the secret ingredient. We take the rabbit poopies and we shovel them over here into this bathtub. There are red worms in here, and they eat up the rabbit poopies, and then they poop out our fertilizer of choice: worm castings. Worm castings are awesome! They're really expensive too, if you try to buy them. Catch on the flip side, bunny rabbits!

So now we're going to mix up our potting soil. All right, so we got our sand, we got our rotted down wood chips, and we got worm castings. There's a whole web of symbiotic relationships taking place in the soil. The sand enhances the potting soil's ability to drain; this is a sponge essentially, so this holds moisture in the potting soil mixture. This has all of the nutrients that a plant needs to get a good start in life.

Let's go ahead and sift these materials so that they're more manageable. As you can see, this mixture is becoming coarser and coarser the longer I'm sifting it, and that's because the nice, fine stuff is slipping through this sieve. I'm just gonna kick this stuff off to the side and let the chickens and tea plants have at it.

There's the nice sifted stuff. As you can see, now let's dump in our worm castings. All right, I think we got this pretty well sifted. Check this aside. Let's throw in our sand.

Once we have this all mixed up, we'll just pack this away into buckets under the house and bust that when we're ready to plant some trees.