Gardeners often struggle to grow plants in containers. You may feel that you have a really black thumb at times when newly planted seedlings fall over dead or fail to thrive. The problem may not be disease or poor gardening acumen but rather your container media otherwise sold as “Potting Soil”. A trip to one of the big box stores or a larger retail nursery will offer gardeners many choices of bagged potting soils. They are marketed to give you the impression they will grow anything and everything. But do they?
Over the last couple of decades I have done comparative potting media trials where I plant small plugs (usually impatiens) three per six inch container. I go out and find every retail brand of potting mix I can find and plant them all up and then follow them for about two months. I’ve been thinking of revisiting the studies and seeing if anything has changed. I also want to test the assumption that you can’t predict the grow ability of a potting soil by reading the ingredient label as some research suggests. While there can always be a surprise with any given product, I think that from my many trials I can make some suggestions to improve the outcome of your gardening adventures in containers.
Growing media is not the same as soil. Since media are placed in containers, often plastic ones, they need to be very porous. Porosity of up to 50% is not uncommon in container media. The bulk of the media needs to hold water and minerals for plant growth. Usually an organic material that has a high cation exchange capacity is used. The darling of potting mixes has been Peat Moss. Since peat moss harvesting is damaging to the environment (see previous blog by Linda CS), many gardeners may want to avoid media with peat moss. Bulking agents that do not hold much water or nutrients are also added to “lighten” or aerate the medium. Horticultural perlite (expanded volcanic glass) is the most common. Sand is also sometimes used but it adds weight to the bag and is not preferred by manufacturers. Some media use bark or other wood products to provide greater porosity.
There are usually about 18 to 20 different media on the market at any given time and the results of growing plants in them is predictable. About 10 of the media will not grow anything very well, 5 give ok results and about 5 of the products will grow a nice plant. A lot of the reason for success or lack thereof is about nitrogen chemistry. If no fertilizer is added, the medium will likely not grow well. You can add your own fertilizer and make about ½ of these poor growing media work. One quarter to one half a teaspoon (approximately 2gm) of ammonium sulfate usually peps up most media that are ok but lack nutrients. This is an amount used in a standard height 6inch (15cm) diameter plastic container. Larger containers and plants will require incrementally more fertilizer to achieve growth goals.
Some media will not grow even when fertilized. This is because they may contain manures, or composts and manures that have added too much salt to the medium. Adding fertilizers to these products only makes them less growable. Sometimes these potting soils will improve with leaching but then fertilizer will need to be added back later to make up for what was leached away. Generally a salty potting mix is worth avoiding.
So how can you tell if you are getting a good or bad mix. You can start by reading the ingredient list. And you will need to decode that list to help you make some decisions. What manufacturers call things can be very misleading. Look for a medium that has fertilizer added and lists what kind of fertilizer was used. These media usually grow without help. Avoid media that use manures, they are not suitable container media ingredients.
Some potting soils claim they can grow plants bigger than others, some claim to be all organic and some claim to be friendly to the earth. This is all marketing. Look for a simple ingredient list that is fortified with a nutrient charge (fertilizer). Begin there. You may want to sieve the medium to remove large particles if you are growing seeds, add more bulking agent (bark, sand, perlite, pumice) for plants that need increased porosity such as orchids, bromeliads and cactus. Don’t be afraid to modify potting mixes to suit the needs you might have. If plants don’t grow, consider adding more nutrients. After growing for some time (months to years), many media will breakdown, and the plant will need to be repotted in a new medium.
This is very nice but discouraging. In reviewing the choices, few sources seem to be completely satisfactory.
I have found that media using spaghnum are most satisfactory. I avoid “sedge peat” (used in some Michigan products) but I still have to bear some guilt for damage to peat bogs.
I bought some medium from Whole Foods a couple of years ago that must have been composted lumber yard waste. Horrible. You can’t trust anyone.
It is discouraging. Most container media are not that great. The ones that list fertilizer and avoid manure are usually quite a bit better. Compost and forest products are not what they seem. Coir, peatmoss, if they are used early on in the label list would indicate a possibly better soil.
Yet another helpful and timely blog post from the Garden Professors.
I just had to return several bags of potting soil. It was full of chunks of wood, BIG pieces of bark, lumps of those little green fertilizer balls, and it stunk. I did think to take the one bag I had opened with me as proof when I returned the rest. Thankfully I had no problem getting a refund for the unopened bags.
Our local producers of bagged mixes use kelp and other seaweed as a significant part. I have long wondered about the salt content and it’s effects. Is there any information on this?
Please do not buy products with kelp or othe seaweeds. Their use is not recommended for several reaosns.
https://pubs.extension.wsu.edu/the-efficacy-and-environmental-consequences-of-kelp-based-garden-products
Thank you for this post. I was just thinking it would be great to see more articles relating to houseplants and growing in containers from the Garden Professors and then I came here and saw this! I have been wondering about fertilizing my houseplants/container plants (usually annuals). I know from Linda Chalker-Scott’s work that the ground in my yard likely doesn’t need much fertilizer, if any, but are containers different? It seems like the plants would eventually use up what is in the container. Are there any studies/resources on this? Thank you.
Yes you are correct plants eventually use up container minerals. Proof of essentiality of mineral elements wad developed this way long ago by Leibig. (See Leibig’s law of the minimum). Add to this the fact that media for containers have greater porosity and leaching. Thus needed elements like nitrogen run out and plants will slow their growth. Other elements and micronutrients can also run out so a balanced slow release fertilizer will work. If you want organic sources of nutrients there are many available and all work ok. I did do some research on organics for container media and Gro Power was quite good. But any work if used according to directions..
Thank you for your response; this is good to know. I will look into the Gro Power.
Any other brands get thumbs-up or thumbs-down? I’ve found Premier (especially their Pro-Mix line) best, but at a much lower price point, 3.5cf bales of Lambert have been serving me quite well.
Is there a better medium than potting mixes that you can buy for container plants? Can you DIY a potting mix to ensure it will have all the nutrients it needs and not have any undesirable ingredients or too much salt? What would be the “recipe” for such a DIY potting mix?
Yes you can DIY. The ingredients you chose will depend on your ethic and experience you generate over time. Generally 50%-75% solids that hold nutrients and water such as peat or coir and the 25-50% bulking agent that develop porosity in the media will work. These would be bark, perlite or pumice. The nutrient charge can be from organic or inorganic fertilizer sources. I prefer timed release/slow release urea based coated fertilizers. How you make the blend depends on what you are growing, for cacti and other plants that want a well drained soil 50% bulking agent. For flowering perennials (ex. ferns and begonia) you can use more organic component. the best way to approach this is to dive in and try it.
I’m far from a Garden Professor, but have you heard of Al Tapla’s mixes? One is 5-1-1 of pine/fir bark fines, perlite, and peat/coir, plus a little garden lime and (optionally) controlled-release fertilizer.
The other is “gritty mix,” which is 1-1-1. The first part is 1/8″-1/4″ fir (or 1/8-3/8″ pine) bark, usually obtained by getting repti-bark from petsmart, the second is 1/8″-1/4″ grit, typically in the form of “grower’s mix” #2 chicken grit (usually granite) from almost any agricultural store. The third part is turface (or Napa floor dry, or other calcined clay), which is screen at 1/8″ and larger.
The idea for each is to get all approximately the same sized particles, resilience against compaction, and no perched water table. Obviously it’s only for potting, not in-ground use. I haven’t taken it to many container-grown veggies yet, since it can be a bit of work for annuals, but it’s been great for houseplants, small trees and shrubs (bay laurel, lemon verbena, etc.), herbs, and almost anything I plan to keep going for more than a year. It does require frequent, faithful watering, but does a crackerjack job of preventing root rot and other overwatering problems. I’d go so far as to say it’s almost impossible to overwater, since there’s no perched water table.
I notice there was no response to the question about Tapla and his “gritty mix”. I’d like to see a response to that! Really. Some commentary on the turface mythology is long overdue, LOL!
I had been successfully growing nearly all my plants (including murraya koenigii) in a mix of peat, “bark” mulch that was actually more than half wood chips, and Growstone. It worked great. Then Growstone closed down and I immediately went out and bought every bag of Growstone I could find in town. The stuff is awful for hydroponics, which is how they were marketing it, but I got great results in my use of it as a pumice alternative in a peat-based container mix. Over the course of a very extended illness I lost every single plant that was NOT planted in this mix. However I lost all those bags of Growstone due to a move and a series of disasters caused by U-haul (we won’t go into that but it was truly awful and Growstone was not the only stuff that got left behind).
So now I need something else. On the one hand you seem to imply we shouldn’t be using peat, but on the other, you suggest using it in the bulk of a diy container mix. As for “bulking” agents, I hate perlite, it invariably floats up out of the mix and I don’t see what it could possibly be contributing anyway. Roots grow around it. Punice is crazy expensive and nearly unobtainable – I lived within spitting distance of a pumice mine and still couldn’t lay hands on it. And forget bark. It, too, is now officially unobtainium. The big box stores only carry dyed chopped up houses and rubber stuff, or stringy cypress mulch which is almost never actually cypress, but chock-full of other awfulness. As for the peat moss I can get, its finely ground stuff intended to top dress your lawn. If the other stuff still exists I can’t find it at all, and if I could I doubt I can afford it. Sorry, but $50 for a bag of peat or bark or whatever isn’t going to cut it.
So what is a poor (literally and figuratively) gardener to do? I’m in zone 7a now but that is not warm enough to plant out my remaining M. koenigii (again, that gawdawful move). 75% of commercial potting mixes are basically trash, and the rest are super expensive. Nor is having to drive 200 miles to get a bag of (allegedly) actual bark that is too chunky anyway any kind of solution.
Is there some way to press wood chips into service as part of a potting mix that won’t compact from the weight of the atmosphere alone, nor “rob” the mix of nitrogen? At least I can still get that, if with some difficulty, from municipal yard waste programs. And if I must resort to perlite as part of the mix, I guess I must. But I haven’t been able to find pine fines for over 20 years now, and bark mulch that is actually bark mulch is long gone as well.
Perlite contributes porosity. It is the main reason behind using it. Mixes such as peat perlite have been used for years a cutting propagation medium. Yes it floats and that is its downside. I am not familiar with growstone.
Wood chips also float and have been used successfully in container media if you add enough nutrients to accomodate nitrogen draw. Conrad Skimina gave the Amer.Soc. Hort Science keynote address at an annual meeting about how he had grown plants in pure fresh chipped Eucalyptus branches. and showed data. Wood products have a long history of use in container media and if the nutrients are correct will work. All organic matter breaks down as do wood chips and so the media still need to be changed eventually. You don’t have to resort to perlite. I have used Silica sand in several media very successfully. It is available at larger hardware stores or lumber yards, is very uniform in size (I use the coarse grit) and will not break down in media over time and certainly will not “float”.
I’ve never had the partially composted mulch float up. At least not in the noticeable way that Perlite always has. I do always make sure it is THOROUGHLY soaked before adding it to a potting mix. A week or so in a 5 gallon bucket of water isn’t too much, in my experience. I don’t use big chunks of bark. Which you can’t really get any more anyway. I would guess that if you ever let it dry out so badly that the wood component stopped holding moisture it would be difficult to impossible to rehydrate it in the mix without drowning the plants, so maybe being dry would let it “float” up?
I’m apparently conflating porosity with aeration. Are there existing posts on this blog that explain porosity vs aeration a bit better? The Growstone helped with aeration, not sure what it did for “porosity” if anything. It’s aeration in the soil I’m concerned with in its absence. Think of Growstone as artificial pumice. It was basically recycled glass that was blown into a foam during its manufacture so you got this spongy sort of hard rock-like chunky stuff at the end that was full of air holes. Roots penetrated it even more than natural pumice. It was highly alkaline (so terrible for hydroponics) and seemed to be well-balanced by the high acidity of a peat-heavy mix. It also made worries about compaction moot. Perlite and sand don’t do any of that as far as I know. I’ve actually never used sand in a soil mix, in over 50 years, except for whatever was in the potting soils that used to make up about 1/3rd of my mixes in the pre-Growstone era.
I can’t seem to find anything about Conrad Skimina’s eucalyptus chip media online. Was anything ever written down that you know of? I am curious about why eucalpytus specifically and if he tried any other type of wood chip media, also his methodology as well as results. I wonder about how hard it would be to keep that sort of media evenly moist (among other things).
Perhaps what your “growstone” is analagous to is rock wool. This product spun glass was used widely in the Horticultural industries last century. Porosity and aeration are intimately related for technical discussion of this please see the text by Handrek and Black noted below. For more on rockwool see Fonteno and others J. AMER. SOC. HORT. SCI. 115(3):375-381. 1990.Physical Properties of and Plant Responses to Rockwool. For more on container media in general Please look at Handrek and Black (Growing media for ornamental plants and turf,2002.) Conrad’s remarks were part of a keynote address at an ASHS meeting, I don’t think there was a published paper but perhaps. This was many years ago. His main point was that it did not matter what the substrate was as long as porosity was maintained and nutrients provided at the correct levels. Back in the day at Monrovia nursery, water was not limiting, so very porous media could be irrigated frequently.