Grow What You Eat: The Dirt

It seems that container gardening, especially, requires good dirt. So just like a new mom, I read all of the plant parenting books to make sure that I made the best possible home for my plant babies.

Ingredients for good container gardening soil include:

• Vermiculite or perlite
• A bit of coco peat or "coir" (to help retain moisture)
• Oyster shells
• Dolonitic or cacitic limestone
• Equal parts N-P-K (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium)
• pH between 6.0 and 7.0
  
• A top layer of compost and peat moss or humus

And, as with most new parents, creating this perfect home became way too much work and I chucked it all for the following:

MiracleGro's Organic Choice Potting Mix...



And a top layer of compost from my composter.



Things I'll do differently next year:

• I might try looking in a specialty garden store for soil ingredients, as all of the convenient haunts, i.e. Lowes', Home Depot and Meijer, had not one of these items. The choices were potting soil or top soil. At least I knew enough not to get top soil...
• I will probably put the compost in a middle layer rather than the top layer. I had a lot of seeds in the composter that decided to sprout and I couldn't figure out which seedlings I had purposefully planted and which ones were impostors. On a happy note, I did get a volunteer tomato plant out of the deal.