Gentle Gardener makes its own sustainable container garden potting mix. 15 years ago in Great Britain gardeners started picketing/boycotting DIY stores and garden centers over peat based potting soil; I was at Findhorn and Kew and sat up and took notice. Took 10 years to develop supply chain of alternatives here in the clueless, cheap transport US.
A few steps to enlightened dirt/soil:
First, make your own compost and/or worm castings (compost), and aged leafmould (what the Brits call a pile of chipped/shredded leaves left for a year to decompose). Second, get locally made municipal compost if it's not all been sold to a commercial compost company locally. Third, buy only locally made compost from a reputable supplier, and ensure it doesn't have persistent herbicides in it. We have a very good one near Charlottesville from Panorama Farms called Panorama Paydirt. There are sometimes shortages due to demand. Our local worm compost is Black Gold Organics.
Coir Bricks are portable, peat-free potting media from a quickly renewable source (peat bogs.. not so quick). We supplied Brent Heath from Brent and Becky's Bulbs with coir for a container garden bulb planting workshop and he loved how the fibres give the root hairs of bulbs something to cling to. (He too is a Fafard peat fan but that's Canadian and not very sustainable from a transport perspective, not to the midAtlantic or South).
You need warm water and TIME to expand the coir. We mix in a muck bucket with the hot water, load and by the time we are at the job site, it's done. Extra bricks are portable and take up lots less room than bags/bales of promix. Extra worm compost helps too.
Mulching the tops of pots with coir chips, stones or moss or even found objects helps with soil loss. I too want to experiment with corel stones from the hydroponics folks.
As with so many other things, you get what you pay for, BUT, the best is homemade and free. Also a very good workout turning the compost from bin to bin to tumbler. I find shoveling this particular s... much more meditative and enjoyable than the corporate kind....
Organic Mechanics is simply the BEST container garden/potting soil on the East Coast. It's also great for topdressing lightly on lawns being reseeded; those rice hulls and coir are better than straw, which blows away. (Thank you Mark, for helping Gentle Gardener client container gardens do so well.)
And, the checkered local/state phosphorus bans are just DUMB. If you want to garden sustainably, you need good root development, particularly as plants are being established in low organic matter % soils (pretty much everywhere in VA except for the forest floor). Phosphorus from organic sources gives you that to get started; healthy soil life keeps it going. Demonizing one element just confuses the public.
The point is: do what farmers MUST do: have a soil conservation/management plan: pretest, measure, (ignore what the land grant universities tell you to do, which is almost always to apply 10-10-10 no matter what their own lab test show), get a professional garden coach or sustainable landscape designer/organic horticulturalist help you interpret and apply the correct amounts of organics, preferably locally made.
Organic Mechanics has a huge location advantage, being within 400-500 miles (and thus 'local' per USDA and LEED USGBC) of much of the East Coast megaplex population.
Soil test, test microbial action via the soilfoodweb guys out West, apply the organics (including worm compost, mulches on top, green manures, cover crops and nitrogen fixing plants like leguminous trees and, ahem, clover), don't overdo ANYTHING, water, and heck, be patient, observant and not a picky perfectionist.
Do NOT let the "Perfect" be the Enemy of the Good......or the organic.......or the local......or the sustainable.
Posted by: virginia rockwell | 13 August 2010 at 12:16 PM