yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

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


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

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.

More Articles

View All
How YOU Should INVEST $20,000 | Ask Mr. Wonderful #6 | Kevin O'Leary Answers Your Business Questions
Hi Kevin, my question is, what should I do with the 21,000 in my bank account? I’m only 20, and I have 21,000 because of a parent passing away when I was younger. Well, it’s definitely time for another session of Ask Mr. Wonderful! I got dozens of fantas…
The Untold History of Warren Buffett | 2023 Documentary
An ambitious young businessman, Warren Buffett, is in the early stage of building his financial empire. He’s set his sight on a struggling company out of the Midwest, hoping to break it apart and sell its assets. Sanborn Maps provides minute-by-minute map…
Bobi Wine: The People’s President | Official Trailer | National Geographic Documentary Films
Election [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] This is a message to the government. University, I didn’t know he was a musician. He was different. I didn’t have so many dreams; she impacted my life. She made me realize we had to impact other lives. I’ve …
Collecting Crab Pots | Alaska: The Next Generation
You’ll learn as you’re going and get older, you make your own shortcut. You’ll always make it back home. Ready, Glyn? Oh, yeah. Glyn and I are off to pull out crab pots from Olga Bay, where he has one and I have one. And that increases our chances of get…
Game theory worked example from A P Microeconomics
What we have here is a free response question that you might see on an AP Microeconomics type exam that deals with game theory. It tells us Bread Basket and Quick Lunch are the only two sandwich shops serving a small town, so we’re in an oligopoly situati…
How Much Home You Can ACTUALLY Afford (By Salary)
What’s up, Graham? It’s Guys here. So, have you ever wondered how much money you need to make to buy a house like this, or this, or even this? Well, wander no longer, because today we’ll cover exactly how much income it takes to rent and buy the typical h…