Comparing Store Bought Bagged Soils to Find The Best One for Your Needs
Comparing Store Bought Bagged Soils to Find The Best One for Your Needs
In this episode, we are comparing some popular options of bagged garden soils to find the best one for your specific gardening application. This will prevent you from overspending, or underspending on garden soil and selling yourself short. We will also go through which bagged soils work best with each application and why.
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any ?ideas how to find out if grazon got into the bags you buy?
Thank you for this video!!!
I am starting with a bare yard, there are a few noxious weeds, what should I do first?
I used miracle gro and now my wild strawberries are getting chlorosis 🙁
Amend cheap top soil! Add like peat moss etc! I’ve grown great gardens in it.
Pretty soon i will be tilling an acre for a larger scale garden so far top soil and horse manure has worked fine but i cant get an acre of manure so il use what i got and get some pete moss and perlite to aid the clay soil and maybe some trifecta plus.
Don’t waste money on buying potting mix it’s cheaper to make it.
3cf peat moss 10$
3 cf compost 8$
1 cf perlite 8$
1cf vermiculite 10$
A bag of garden tone 7$
Total: 43$. Store in trash cans.
4, 2cf bags of “premium potting mix (miracle grow)” $56
By the way, anything ideal for growing marijuana is also ideal for growing anything which grows fruit or flowers, so I don’t see the point of the comment on marijuana. There are no special needs for growing marijuana. If you can grow tomatoes in it you can grow marijuana in it or peppers or pumpkins or whatever they have essentially identical needs.
My kind of herb is mint
Big box store manure is from feed lots and is very high in salt.
Well now i know i didn’t buy a bad soil?
I peat moss in my pots, and add potting soil to the top.
I only till the top soil every year, and add some fertilizer.
For the ground soil i just till it and add fertilizer, i don’t add any soil.
I do add some dead plants in the ground soil.
Also anything like leaves that fall from the trees and the old plants i planted last year is in the garden.
The plants i add to the garden are things like old apples, lettuce parts not used in salads.
I would rather put plants many people put in the trash into my garden.
I also think after the soil in the pots become so destroyed, can put it into the soil of the ground garden and till it in.
Then can start over with new potting soils into the above ground pots.
Which would you recommend for container potatoes? I have a very good organic potato fertilizer to add in. Thanks for the video!
Good information
I will never buy that blue bag from Lowes again. It was filled with rocks.
I love these types of videos! Because the bags and selection at your local Lowes/Home Depot changes every couple of years!
Be careful with mixes that contain “forest product”, I’ve got a bag half filled with sticks that were up to 3 inches long and some green hard plastic.
People have used plastic water bottles(with lids on) to take up space in big containers. I haven’t. I have used 3" tree limbs but still heavy. Like your method.
Unfortunately the "top soil" in the bags at the box stores has changed. It used to fill depressions in the lawn and grow grass well. Came out very black, contained a fair bit of sand, was cheap and worked well. THEN suddenly these bags seem to contain what is essentially very fine mulch. It does NOT fill depressions well, it does NOT grow grass well.
I have found the best bagged soil/composts etc. Is out of of Maine called Coast of Maine they use lobster fish and seaweed. I think you’d like it
Ma
I love these type of videos because the soil brands/ options available at your local hardware store change slightly every couple of years!
I’m feeling dumb here, but…that last bag says "Garden Soil", not compost as stated in the video. Is that what bagged garden soil is?
I just want to plant pots for herbs cooking herbs can I still use miracle grow.
Sorry ran on and on had to advance and still did not learn everything! Did not touch on organic soils or Miracle Grow potting mix which killed all my annuals last year compared to what you could get from the garden centres!
For 4X4X15 deep how many bags of what should I buy?
you’re getting a lot of facts wrong and terminology not even right. most of your bags there are not soil but rather potting mix, garden mix, compost or simply growing media. they have nothing to do with soil, which is a mix of specific particle size categories of parent mineral rock. when these bagged potting mixes are not mostly wood based, they indeed will make good growing media for pots or even top ups in garden.
What garden supply stores call topsoil or non-premium garden soil is typically truly horrible stuff they can make money ffom, but may turn into a brick or just fine sand in a season or two. They use things like silt from river dredging, spent mushroom compost, straw, sand, etc. All typically no cost materials they have continuous access to and they can talk up as wonderful soil mix ingredients. experience shows how horrible it is, once in your garden and some time has passed.
most of the bagged stuff is also low cost ingredients they can talk up on labels, or other people do the marketing. you’re right that adding so called fake premium ingredients just increases the price for little gain, as again they like to make money off suckers. these pseudo-premium ingredients are things like water penetration products or water storage crystals, and things like slow release fertilizer. usually tiny and useless amounts of these "premium" ingredients.
all in all you’re on the right track trying to clue people into the shenanigans but, you need more facts right to point people in the right direction. making your own potting mix is okay for a few pots where you might grow some veggies that dont belong in row crops. for non edible plants that can grow for years without re-potting or constant problems by using wrong mix, each mix is quite customized. Again the box stores have potting mix bags supposedly customized for specific perennials but unfortunatelly they’re mostly horrible in real life use, as they use sub-par ingredients and pretend they’re premium. they know that most people dont have the time to learn the truth and wont be able to figure out why things go wrong etc., as long as they got your money.
I watched your last video where you said get out and buy a tiller….this video you say it’s not ideal to till your soil…???
Interesting. Thanks for the helpful information. "Home is where the garden is" 🤔🌱🍃🐞🐝🐛🙂
Thank you, would have been nice to mention the sizes of the bag. So one gets an idea of how much to buy.
Thanks though!
Basically… Compost Manure and Peat moss 1:1 is awesome, take it a step further and add perlite or vermiculite (all 1:1:1) and you’re golden.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge with your fellow Michiganders! Love your good genuine character…. Hope to make it to your store this season!
in San Diego we NEED water holding ability!!
Cannabis SHOULD be a part of EVERY garden!
What is the basic recipe for a ground garden for soil and manure 1:9 or 1:3?? So confusing !!!
First of all nothing wrong with cannabis…its been made out to look like a bad thing…second of all the soil it requires just so happens to also be reaaaally good soil for potted fruit trees!! Its great soil in general for anything that makes flowers,seeds, and fruit..including cannabis. Don’t hate on the soil just because of that.
Thanks for your expertise in describing in rich detail the pros and cons of different bags of soil for us to distinguish and hopefully choose the right stuff to be on track with growing a dream garden. Never buy the most expensive or the cheapest kind .
TOP SOIL
dont buy any bags get truck and buy it that way save big
I have found calling around you can purchase a decent 50:50 loam and compost at a decent cost. Or just compost. Much better deal for a large quality.
The only thing from Miracle Grow I like are their indoor plant bottled nutrients ! the ones that come with the pump already! They are not like the crazy high NPK regular MG, it’s very diluted … Like the blooming food is 0.5-1-0.5 with only 3 ingredients and low salt content compared to regular MG.. I like to use their blooming food to give seedlings a quick phosphorus boost!
TOPIC : SINGLE BAG INGRIDIENTS VS MIXING THEM ALL TOGETHER INGRIDIENTS. DEFINITELY MIX THEM!
. I’ve took 6 different mediums at Lowes: MG raised bed mix, MG moisture control, MG potting mix, MG organics, jungle growth and humus/manure.
With those mixed together I get: peat moss, alfalfa meal, Forrest compost, Yucca, worm castings, green sand, Coco coir, dolomite lime, kelp meal, poultry litter, horticulture ash, manure, humus, perlite and bone meal.
Then I’ll top dress with bat guano, kelp, blood and bone meal, CalMag, biochar, superThrive, beneficial bacteria and fungi. Npk in the medium is 0.5-0.5-0.5 roughly.
I’d love your thoughts on this diverse mix. Is it overkill? What would you add or take away? I think it was a good idea. I got allll those nutes instead of 3 or 4. By mixing I got them all(plus compost) and the base is primarily peat moss/coco/perlite. Much better than just ground up wood chips and plain potting soil. Why dont more people do this?
i have steady supply pf vermicast, compost, humic acid, and i buy cheap potting mix, and im all good. shout out from the Philippines.
Thank goodness! I held off watching for a day as I was worried I bought the wrong stuff! Whew! Sta-Green (blue bag) A-OK.
For all my cannabis growers, you still should not be spending big cash on bagged soil (rhymes with box barm) *cough* anyways lol real microbe heavy organics is ALWAYS more affordable
Def an old video. Potting soil is 20 bux for 1.5cf.
There are actually potting soils that are $50-$60 a BAG? Now, that’s just insane. I’ve seen that "happy frog" stuff for $20 bucks or more a bag. I have had great results with Vigaro potting soil from Home Depot. it is about $8 a bag, and you don’t need to add fertilizer to it like some inferior bagged soils need you to.
I have bought a couple bags of the blue bagged stuff in this video "Sta green" or something like that. I do wonder how it will be rated here. I will be getting the Vigaro mostly though for my large pots.
Maybe mixing some of that bagged compost stuff with some inferior potting soil and then some peat based stuff and some fertilizer could give you a decent medium? But, if you do not have that stuff laying around, I’d buy the Vigaro, Miracle Grow has been poor quality lately, I haven’t ever bought it before me buying 1 bag last summer. And that plant I planted in that MG soil did NOT grow well at all.
So, either it just started sucking big time recently, OR MG has always sucked. And, for the price of it I expected my plant to do GREAT.
From the description of the soils, the Sta green is similar to the Vigaro potting soil, and close in price.
As this video comes to the end, i see now that the "best vs worst" rating is just a guess by the guy making the video by the contents in the bagged soils, and NOT an actual rating of how good each soil had done at growing plants.
And, I had typed in best and worst POTTING SOILS, and had gotten this as result.This is mentioning soils that are for in ground and some potting soils here too.
That bag of Miracle grow POTTING soil laying in the background hasn’t been mentioned at all.
I really sucks when you watch a video that is over 12 minutes long and it does NOT cover what you wanted it to cover. I wanted to know which soil (potting soil specifically was in my search words) grew the nicest plants aka had the most nutreints for potted plants.
My soil grew a bunch of moss on top over the winter, do I work that stuff back into the soil when I start planting this spring or do I need to remove it?
I made what I feel was a very high quality and low cost garden bed and it has produced very well all year for me, thank goodness right? What I did was I set up cinder blocks in an excess part of my driveway and basically composted stuff in there all winter from 2019-2020, kept smashing down the leaves food scraps you name it. Now when this was done in the spring I mixed the black velvet mushroom compost, black kow cow manure, and a large brick of peat moss one each to fill to the top. Couldnt be happier with it, and it was very cheap.
OMG, what took me so long to find your channel! As a container grower, I’ve leaned the hard way with compacted putrid soil. Thank you so much 👏
luke i have high raised beds . i am 85 years. last year my son built me hugelculture beds. this year i wiil have to add a lot more soil. i will be coming to see you as i live in saginaw. so weather permitting,i will see you soon
Miracle grow is trash, avoid it at all costs. Adds salt and all sorts of other nasty build ups in your soil. Not to mention it seems to be ten times more full of fungus gnats than other options