Old Potting Soil. Here's How to Make It NEW Again.

Today I'm going to show you how to replenish your potting soil so that you can use it year after year. You do not have to be throwing potting soil away. We only need to add some nutrients and some structure to it. I start out by gathering all of the used soil that I can find, pretty much any tree that didn't make it, any of my green stalks, specifically the strawberries that never seemed to make it through the full summer season. And I'll pull those out and I usually will kind of put it all together in my gorilla cart here until it's time to put together a new green stalk. It is a really great way to reuse the soil instead of having to buy so much. As a gardener that grows a lot of things in containers, reusing soil and replenishing soil is of the utmost importance because I don't know about you guys but if you have never gone recently and looked at the price of soil it is crazy and I don't want to keep doing that. So here's the strawberries that didn't make it. You've probably seen some plants in there. That's how frustrated I am. I'm not even going to pull them out. I'm just like, whatever, you're going to feed the soil. These were super wet. We've just gotten through like an intense amount of rain so it has been going on for probably at least the last seven days, non-stop heavy rain. And so these tears were super, super moist and I usually like them to dry out a little bit. I feel like it's easier to manage right now. It's basically mud which isn't the greatest thing but it was going to rain today too. So usually I would lay it out on this tarp and let it dry out for a day but unfortunately there is not a day in the 10-day forecast that's going to allow for this. I'm hoping that by mixing it with all of the used soil that I've been collecting that's been sitting in the shed, which is super, super dry, that they'll even themselves out a little bit. A little bit of the wet with a little bit of the dry. The next step I usually like to do is I like to get some fresh compost. This stuff is not completely broken down. You can probably see a few little sticks, a few little pieces of the shredded paper but it's so close. Look how dark it is guys. That, I love compost and the plants are going to love it too. It is the number one thing that you can give to your garden. If you're not making your own compost I really encourage you to do it but if you're not or you're not ready or it's not finished anytime soon because that first batch does seem to take the longest, go ahead and pick you up some compost from the store. Black cow is probably the best one out there but sometimes it's hit or miss with that. If you can find a local area or on like a Facebook marketplace where you can get compost that other people make, that's a great option. The generic Timberland one of black cow is okay. I got one bag recently and I tell you it was just almost all sticks and then I tried the mushroom compost. That was awful too. Whatever you can get your hands on like two bucketfuls is perfect and then I add perlite. Perlite is like a volcanic ash or rock and it basically helps with allowing it to drain better which usually is not a problem for us in here in Florida because we get so much rain and it's so hot that you don't have a problem with keeping the water in. It's usually the reverse. It's like or keeping the water out. We usually have the reverse of keeping it in but this soil was so wet I was really worried about not having enough perlite and even as I was putting the fertilizer here. FYI this is a Haas fertilizer. It is a 5-4-3 I believe it is. 5 nitrogen, 4 phosphorus, 3 potassium but anything that you can get where the NPK or the three dash numbers are close is what you're looking for. Something like an all-purpose fertilizer. I was looking at this as I was putting that down and I was like I need some more perlite so I ended up using the rest of my bag there. I buy it in bulk so I'm going to order another bag but I really wanted to be able to see a lot of those perlite pieces to help with some of the water that was really holding into those strawberries which might have been the reason why the strawberries went downhill so fast for me and I think that seems to happen every year but I'm really not sure what to do about it other than the fact that you know I have good drainage. I add lots of perlite but they always seem to get soaked during the rains. Anyway maybe it's the green stock growing. I'm not 100% sure but strawberries grown in Florida during the summer isn't really you shouldn't hold out a lot of hope for those anyway but it did seem to do the job by adding the perlite and mixing it with that really dry soil. It did seem to stop clumping up and it was going into the green stalks a little bit better. The really the only three things that I add when I'm refreshing the soil is something like perlite vermiculite or sand to add for the drainage, the compost and the more high quality compost you can get and by high quality I mean grown at home or at another nursery or garden or farm and then the last resort being the bag soil and then a good even fertilizer like the Hoss fertilizer you can do. Down Earth has one, Neptune's Harvest has one, another one I like is the tomato tone. Espuma has a really great one, plant tone, tomato tone, any of those are all really good options but you want to go with a granular. We'll use the liquid fertilizers later in the season with the green stalks but for now we want to add it to the soil so that that way it can start breaking down now and it'll be ready to feed the plants when we put them in here. Occasionally I do get asked if people should be completely throwing out all their old soil and of course I'm like no absolutely replenish it. Soil is so expensive but there are instances where it might be something you consider because there was like a major pest issue or a disease issue like blight or you might have squash vine borers and the eggs will stay in the soil or the disease or the fungal issue will stay in the soil. Maybe you don't have the ability to replace the soil so then what you want to do is what is considered crop rotation and this is basically where you're going to segregate that soil and separate it. So if you had tomatoes and you had a tomato pest or you had a tomato disease you're going to segregate that soil and you're going to grow something in it that has nothing to do with the nightshade family. So you might want to grow sweet potatoes in it or broccoli or cow peas something outside of that family where the disease of the pest is not going to affect the new plant because it's usually very specific to a certain family of plants. If you can I would go ahead and get new soil for your tomatoes that year so you don't accidentally have a problem but if that's not an option as well maybe you can't afford it or you can't get access to the type of soil that you want and you absolutely can't rotate. Your other option is layering and this is basically where you take the infected soil and you don't rough it up like I did on the tarp and instead you just leave it in the tiers or the container that it was in. Try to work in some sand or some perlite into the top couple inches of the soil and then you're going to start layering your compost and your mulch. So you're going to layer one to two inches of compost on top of your soil not mixed in and then one to two inches of mulch whatever kind wood chips leaves whatever you have and your goal is is to try to separate the infected soil from the plant leaves above and I know that that kind of goes against our common thought that you're going to grow a plant into this soil so it's going to get the disease right? Not necessarily. A lot of the times it has to do with not the plant or the bug getting the soil from the roots but actually getting splashed up like the spores or the bacteria getting splashed up onto the top part of the plant or the leaves of the plant and so when you separate it by creating this layer of compost and this layer of mulch you're creating like a block or a blanket on top of it. Now is that going to work 100%? No, but it should get you the season that you need.