Why do you need homemade potting soil? When starting seedlings at home or growing a container garden, potting soil is essential. It supplies a medium that will help plants grow, while also providing good drainage.
You can buy a pre-made potting soil, or you can make homemade potting soil (which I recommend, because it’s cheaper, especially if you’re doing a sizeable quantity of it). You can even make your own soil blocks using a soil block maker, if desired!
First, here is our recipe for homemade potting soil:
Homemade Potting Soil Recipe
Combine:
- 3.5 parts screened compost (1/4″ screen)
- 0.5 parts vermicompost (you can use all compost instead, if you don’t have any vermicompost)Â
- 1 part perlite
- 1 part vermiculite
- 2 parts sphagnum peat moss and/or coir (e.g., coconut husks)
Soil Blocking Mix Recipes
Soil blocking allows you to use a soil blocker tool to create little “cells” of soil for your seedlings, without the aid of a celled plastic tray. (See the picture below for soil blocks.) We use and recommend these recipes from Eliot Coleman’s book, The New Organic Grower, if you’re interested in soil blocking.
The buckets referred to below are a standard 10 quart bucket.
Main Soil Block Mix
Combine:
- 3 buckets brown peat
- 1/2 cup lime
Mix together, then add:
- 2 buckets coarse sand or perlite
- 3 cups base fertilizer (this is a mix of equal parts bone meal, colloidal phosphate, and greensand)
Mix together again, then add:
- 1 bucket soil
- 2 buckets compost
Mix everything together well. (In this recipe, the “bucket” is a standard 10-quart bucket.) Â
Mini-Soil Block Mix
Combine:Â
- 16 parts brown peat (screen through 1/4″ mesh before use)
- 1/4 part collodial phosphate
- 1/4 part greensand
- 4 parts well-decomposed compost (screen through 1/4″ mesh before use)
