How to make DIY potting soil mix at home for a fraction of the cost of store bought mix

In this video, I'm going to show you how we can

make

a

potting

mix at

home

that will be almost the same or even better than what you would find in the

store

. I'll show them to you right here. something like this which is usually what you're going to find is going to be like a high quality

potting

mix at the

store

and this bag

cost

us 12 so it's very expensive for a bag of potting mix and a great thing to do at

home

. it's going to

cost

a lot less money, ridiculously less money, real quick guys, call back here with gardener bravo 6.

If you end up enjoying this video, I would really appreciate it if you could give me the thumbs up too if you want to see more practical tips on gardening and video tutorials I do at least weekly probably more once we get into the growing season. I'm excited about today's video, let's get into it guys, so probably the main reason I'm making this video is because I see a lot of beginning gardeners get very discouraged. when you are going to buy potting

soil

to use in your garden, like I said, a bag of potting mix costs us 12, that will be the going price for a high quality potting mix that you can get in the store anywhere like the What it's going to cost you is 10 to 15 and that's a little bit of a bummer, you know one bag will fill a couple, maybe three, four containers, depending on the size container you're using.

If you want to do a good amount of gardening, you know, if you're looking at 10 containers or more, that's really going to add up just a quick note for those of you who have been gardening for a while, this video might be a little complicated. review for you guys, you know we're not reinventing the wheel here by any means, but I want to put a lot of emphasis on how much money you can save by making your own potting mix instead of going to the store and buying it, it's a It's like it's a ridiculously large amount of money you will save by making your own potting mix instead of buying it from the store, so again, the bag we have here is what will be considered a high quality potting mix, this is what many Beginning gardeners would use it as a potting mix.

What's in this bag is good and will work. I'm not necessarily a fan of miracle growing products, but again it would work and it's overpriced and you can easily do the same thing. Down here, if we look at the ingredients, we can see that this is formulated from perlite, peat and yucca compost fertilizer. Those are exactly the ingredients I'm going to show you for the potting mix we're going to

make

today, except for the yucca. To be honest, I have no idea what yucca is, okay guys, so here's everything we're going to need for this, so we're going to use peat compost, any aged finished compost will be perlite and totally fine fertilizer fertilizer.

It's going to be optional, you don't have to do that, although it will help you a little bit with your mixing and then we'll just use a storage bag to mix all of this together. The first thing we want to put in is going to be our peat moss, you know, I calculated the cost of peat moss to see how much it would take for a three gallon container and it comes out to about 40 or 50 cents somewhere right there, so when we do that, we'll do it. I will factor. Again, this cost for a three gallon container here, so we'll call it 45 cents when we factor out how much it's going to cost and I went ahead, I already went ahead and did it for each of the products I've calculated how much it's going to cost in perlite how much it's going to cost in peat compost fertilizer everything in terms of the ratio of how much of everything we are going to use is not an exact science but a good guide that I like to follow is two parts peat moss, two parts compost and one part perlite, like this that, for example, if we were using the shovel, I would make two tablespoons of peat, two, two tablespoons of compost and then one tablespoon.

The perlite fertilizer is basically just a handful, there is no exact science to that, so we have the 3.8 cubic foot bag of peat moss which cost us 11.50 again. I considered how much what we are using costs for the container. I'm just going to call it 45 cents it should be available at any home improvement store or check with your local greenhouse or nursery they should have it too and the reason we are doing the peat first is a very important thing we want to do when we are creating this potting mix we want to wet our peat moss before we add anything else to it so the pmos will really resist the water at first like if you put water in here right now all the water will go to the bottom and we basically just have to stir it up to the point in that the peat has absorbed it, so we're going to go ahead and do that and again, there's no exact science, basically we're just going to add a little bit to this until we get a good consistency and we'll go ahead and add a little bit more.

You don't want it to be too soggy, but you just want it enough to the point where it no longer resists water, so it's probably pretty good. I'll mention it. You can see, so if I take this and roll it into a ball and a few drops come out, that means it's good, so the next ingredient is going to be our compost again. We are making two parts peat times two. parts of compost, so we don't really have to measure it, we're basically going to make exactly the same amount of compost as we did with peat moss, so that's fine, the cost of the compost was about eight cents again.

It's not an exact science, but that's about the number that I came up with to coordinate with a three gallon container that we're going to use here and you know the reason for compost for you beginner gardeners, you know that compost will give you. us, our organic matter, organic matter is what will feed your

soil

and that, in turn, is what will feed your plants, so that's the reasoning for organic matter and again, the cost of these numbers will not be exact. We are simply using it as a criterion to give us a precise idea of ​​how much it will cost to fill one of these buckets.

Here I go to my local resource supply center and fill my truck bed with compost for about ten dollars if you can find a good garden supply center, it will be super affordable if you don't have a garden supply center near you, some people will sell compost independently, like if you have a horse farm, chicken farm like that. A lot of people will sell it that way anyway, so check it out if you don't have a supply center and if you don't have a truck, a lot of people will deliver compost to you. I know my garden supply center offers delivery. and you might get farmers who would deliver it to you if you paid them and it will still be a lot less expensive than again if you buy a bagged potting mix so again the next ingredient is going to be our perlite and I'm just noting that it's not a Exact science, we're basically taking it to where we have a good amount of perlite here and if we need to we can add it as we go and it costs us about 20 cents.

Of perlite we are putting here, you may not be able to find bulk perlite like at your home improvement store, but again, most greenhouses or nurseries should provide you with availability of bulk perlite. I know I don't have the bag here, but the bag I

bought

was ten dollars, it's like a super big bag, it's this tall and the last ingredient is going to be our fertilizer, so again, with our fertilizer, we're just putting in a handful. , it doesn't have to be an exact amount. Just giving some quick tips on fertilizer while we talk about it.

I highly recommend using an organic fertilizer instead of a synthetic or artificial one. With artificial fertilizers, it is much easier to overfeed or burn your plants when you are feeding them an organic fertilizer again, organic, it occurs naturally, so it will be much harder for you to give your plant too much, they should be available again in your home improvement store, if not at your local greenhouse or nursery, and there is a lot of accessibility to organic fertilizers online. I will also put some links to Amazon so you can get some ideas on organic fertilizers and it will cost you a little more money upfront since we are shopping. bulk here to some extent, but again, you're going to save a lot of money if you make your potting soil this way, so the cost if we add all that up again, we're averaging 45 cents for our peat compost and it came out to eight cents. per light came out to 20 cents and our fertilizer came out to five cents if I did my math correctly, that comes out to 78 cents to put all the ingredients in one of these containers and then compare that to the pre-made mix if we wanted to fill one of these containers, it's going to cost us eight dollars, so basically it's like a bag of this will fill one and a half of these 78 cents is the cost to fill one of these with our homemade mix, eight dollars to fill. one of those with the store

bought

mix which is terrible okay so I'm going to bring them both closer together so you can see them so again this mix is ​​our homemade mix and this mix is ​​our store bought mix so Just so you can see the consistency of that homemade mixture, I don't know how well you can see that if we roll it into a ball in our hand it forms a ball, but if we release it gently it crumbles right away, that's the consistency we have. .

You're looking and if you look at these two, they actually look almost identical, you know they both have the same ingredients, peat moss, perlite, compost fertilizer, again, 78 cents, eight dollars and they're literally the exact same thing, so just It's another number to think about. So if you do a fair amount of gardening, let's say you wanted to make 10 of these containers that you needed to fill, think about the cost of that. Again, store-bought stuff will cost you about eight dollars to fill a container that costs eighty dollars. If you wanted to fill ten containers or if you wanted to fill 20 containers, that's 160, that's a lot of money and it's not profitable to garden with, it doesn't make sense financially now, again, the cost in your area might not be exactly the same as mine, but even if it varies a little bit, even if it's a dollar fifty container versus eight, you're still saving a ton of money and also what I'm going to do, I'm going to put links below for so many.

Good products I can find that you can buy online to help you get them. I'll also put the link to the container mix if I can find it online so you can check it out again. It's probably a pretty good mix and I'm going to use it in my garden, it'll probably work fine, there's just no point in using it when you can make the same mix for literally a tenth of the price and so far. like products online that I found, there is a really good organic fertilizer that I found online. I'll put an Amazon link in the description below for that.

I also bought perlite before on Amazon and it actually turns out to be quite cost effective again. Compared to making a potting mix from the store I'll put a link below for that too and guys I've been gardening for years and just last year I exclusively made my potting mix like this if I had done this from the beginning . -go instead of buying bagged mixes at the store every time I needed potting mix, I would have saved hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, maybe even thousands, I don't know, I would have saved a lot of money if I had made my own mix. instead of going to the store, so again you can save a lot of money.

I highly recommend making your own mix. It's fun to get out here and get your hands dirty in the garden. Why do not do it? I hope everyone enjoyed this video. I hope you learned something new. If you enjoyed this video, I would really appreciate it if you gave me the thumbs up. Also if you want to see more videos of practical gardening tips from the channel, don't forget to press the subscribe button. I plan to learn how to garden. to videos weekly maybe even more once we get into the growing season we'll see, that's all I have, see you next time, bye.