Your post doesn't violate any rules, Wyndell, and even if it did you couldn't delete it ;-) It's odd seeing a mix being labeled as 'justaguy's mix' even though it is what I used last season. It's difficult for me to recomend a mix since I generally change things up and don't consider any mix I have used to be the 'holy grail', some are just better than others. I think it is much more important to understand the *reason* why a mix is made of what it is than to copy anyone's mix exactly. Al has said numerous times that the mix attributed to him isn't one he uses all that often. I am paraphrasing (from memory) rather than quoting him in saying his mix is kind of a 'general purpose' mix to help folks get started and then modify things as they see fit for their situation. It's offered to help people get started with a faster draining, better aerated mix than what you can find premade at the garden center. I know it's really hard, especially for people just getting started, to understand all these different recipes floating around the net. Starting with a mix someone else lists takes some guesswork out of the process and that can be a real stress reliever. For that reason I think having a thread with various mixes and what they were used for is great. To address your last sentence though, I think I am going to avoid adding anymore 'recipes' to the list. Instead I will just point out that the mix needs to retain enough water, nutrients and oxygen to make it until the next time we attend to the plants. In most cases a mix that does really well at retaining water will not do really well at retaining oxygen and vice versa. That is the dilemma. It is about making compromises. Wouldn't it be great if we could just stick plants in a pot and come back a while later and enjoy their beauty and/or bounty? Self watering and self fertilizing containers try to achieve this as much as they can. Store bought mixes advertise they have fertilizer for 3 or more months in them already (don't believe it). Water retaining crystals are added to persuade people they won't have to water as often (don't believe it). Building the 'perfect' mix is about understanding the needs of 2 things. The plant and the gardener. The perfect mix for plants may well be a nutrient solution and oxygen (hydroponics), but that doesn't mean the gardener wants to buy a generator to save his/her plants when the power goes out. Plants may prefer faster draining mixes, but what if the gardener is going to regularly be away from home for days at a time in the heat of summer? Will the plants get the water they need or will they be dead and brown when the gardener gets home? It is all about making compromises to grow the healthiest, most vigorous plants we can (because we enjoy it) while also meeting our needs as growers. This is where one benefits greatly from understanding what the various ingredients will contribute to the mix (and what they won't). I think Al has done a terrific job of explaining the idea behind well oxygenated mixes, the downside to heavier mixes with a substantial perched water table, how nutrients and water behave in containers etc. I strongly recomend these posts to all. There is a wealth of information in them. It may not all be immediately easy to understand, but worth taking the time. The perfect mix for one gardener may not be perfect for another, it's a bit subjective, but the properties of each potential ingredient in a mix are not subjective. There are objective facts about what they will add or subtract from water, nutrient and oxygen levels in the mix. They have known pH and nutrient properties, they can be counted on to break down over different periods of time with some lasting almost forever and others not even a season. Armed with this knowledge anyone can build the perfect mix that makes the right compromises between their needs and their plant's needs.

Hi Kitty: it's like a drop of refreshing water to hear your kind words. I admire your positive spirit and learning-mind, which I strive for. Your picture looks good to me, much better than the dandelions lawn here. I googled pumice: "A very light and porous volcanic rock formed when a gas-rich froth of glassy lava solidifies rapidly." Good stuff high in phosphorus. Ingrid's soil is decomposed granite, nice and fluffy, and has twice more phosphorus. Her garden is gorgeous with tons of blooms. Alfalfa meal at 2-1-2 works well for her soil, but not for my gluey clay low in phosphorus. Peat moss pH is 4, good to neutralize alkaline tap water. Layering clay with straw and horse manure is much better than my mistake of making potteries by mixing amendments into my sticky clay. Charcoal, or wood ash is very alkaline, pH 10 to 12 (from more than 2 sites). I took some ash from my neighbor's fireplace and tested it, it turned bright green in red cabbage juice. My Mom had acidic soil in Michigan and she dumped wood-ash on leaves (pH 4 to 5), let the rain (pH 5.6) neutralize it .... then use it many months later. She told me to keep fresh wood ash away from roots, otherwise it will burn. Leaves (acidic when fresh), straw, and pine fines (pH 4 to 5) work as buffer: they neutralize extreme pH in soils. I won't get into the boring cation and anion exchange. Coffee ground is also a buffer, it was pink at first, but after soaking for 20 minutes in red cabbage juice, it turned clear. I made many planting holes last year to fix my heavy clay at pH 7.7: Hole with sulfur: it kill all earthworms, didn't help with blooming. A blueberry grower in Soil Forum reported the same with sulfur. Hole with bone meal: still stingy in blooms. Same with 46% superphosphate granules. Hole with alfalfa meal: major glue-up into cement, roots can't expand, leaves turned yellow and shrivel no matter how much water given. Hole with peat moss: not bad, at least I didn't water my 10 azaleas and rhododendrons for the past 12 years ... until I experimented with sulfur and high-nitrogen fertilizer and killed 2 this year. Hole with 1 cup of Hollytone NPK 4-3-4, with sulfur, killed all earthworms, still stingy. Then I spreaded it on the surface around Radio Times, it broke out in blackspot. Making the surface slightly acidic is a great way to germinate fungi. The logic for the high pH in bagged Moo manure, or mushroom compost through adding lime: 1) to deodorize 2) to suppress fungal growth in bags. That's the same logic in spreading wood ash around rose bush: 1) high potassium to fight disease 2) high pH to suppress fungi. Kitty, if people complain about the smell of your horse manure, it means that lime hasn't been added to deodorize, so the pH of you pile is safe. My pile of horse manure has no smell ... the stable told me they put lime to deodorize the enclosed stall in freezing zone 5a winter. I tested it in red cabbage juice and it's medium blue (pH 7.5) in spring, but much more alkaline in winter (pH 8). My good planting holes are, from best to OK: 1) Hole mixed with pine fines (pH 4 to 5), lots of blooming from the humic acid released by decomposed pine, and its 21% water-retention ability. 2) Hole mixed with leaves - lots of bloomings. NPK of leaves is 0.8 / 0.35 / 0.2 Leaves retain water well, and phosphorus is released with decomposed organic matter. 3) Hole mixed with grass clippings - kind of stingy, it might be from the high value of nitrogen. NPK of grass is 4 / 0.5 / 0.2 ... my clay retains nutrients well so higher in nitrogen can make it stingy. Below is a picture of own-root Sonia Rykiel leaf turning chlorotic from nitrogen and iron leaching out of a pot (I watered it with soluble NPK of 18-24-16, with 0.1 iron, plus a high nitrogen soluble NPK of 32-10-10, with 0.33% iron). Compare that to the dark green, own-root Golden Celebration leaves to the right. It's planted in heavy clay mulched with horse manure and alfalfa meal. Both are slow-released nitrogen, and horse manure has iron to make it dark green.

Hmmm. No one ever talks about the microbes. Microbes make top soil unique - definitely not the same as sub soil. Microbes act as the interface between the organic material in soil and the plants. Plants will suffer in sterile soils, not matter how rich the soil is, without microbes - unless of course, the soil is treated with synthetic fertilizers and/or hormones. Plants in soil without microbes (and no fertilizers) will essentially starve. Dirt is not an appropriate synonym for top soil. The two are quite different things. Top soil is almost impossible to store, as the microbes require oxygen. The oxygen only penetrates a few inches in the best of soils, to about 8 inches max. Heavy soils can have top soils that are only fractions of an inch deep, or even none at all. Deprive the microbes of oxygen, and the microbes die in hours. Plastic-bagged, manufactured top soil, will not have appropriate conditions for microbes to survive if they were ever present. Even true top soil, if harvested through grading and stored in piles, will only be true, healthy top soil on the top few inches of the mound. Within hours all of the microbes below the top layer of the mound will have died. True top soil is a living thing. Top soil needs to be harvested and properly placed in a very short period of time. Take a yard of dirt (or at least a good pile) from below the top soil, mix it with fertilizer-free compost, mound it up in a remote area of your yard and watch what happens - nothing. Nothing will grow on that pile, even though it is dirt amended with compost, because it essentially sterile. After one to two years, the microbes will begin to permeate the top layer of the pile and plants will start to show up. With true top soil, the mound would explode with plants after the first rain. Manufactured mixes "cheat" by stuffing the created mix with fertilizers. This works, but is lousy for the environment in many ways, and "hooks" your plants on synthetic fertilizers like drugs. When you hear such names as Monsanto, Miracle Gro, etc. think "pusher". Microbes do not like synthetic fertilizers, so once using fertilizers, you are stuck using them unless you do a lot of work to fix the situation, or wait until the soil regains a proper ecological balance. Plants will grow well in many types of media, even water, if given proper aeration and proper nutrition, i.e. fertilizer. But this is needlessly expensive and again, potentially problematic for our environment. True top soil is magic. It's ecology is wonderfully complex and is only barely beginning to be understood. No manufactured mix will do what true top soil can do for your garden. Growing plants really needs to be thought of first as growing your soil. True top soil, air, and water are vital to most life forms on Earth. We would all starve without true top soil, unless we were able to subsist on fungi. Labeling requirements for growing mixes are virtually non-existent. Those ingredients that might be listed will be very vague. Notice that no synthetic fertilizers are listed, even if they are there in quantity. Anyone can sell any dirt as topsoil, and people often do as a means to avoid disposal fees for dirt. Get top soil from people removing their raised beds, those who have graded the top few inches of an area, people taking out lawns, etc. or from your own backyard. If there are unused areas of your yard that support a dense mat of weeds, at least during wetter, warmer months, then that is true top soil. Yes there will be weeds, but a good mulch will take care of most of that problem. My advice to any gardener is to start with good top soil, nurture that soil by continually adding organic material, worm castings and compost tea, and use a good mulch. These items are 80-90% of the battle for the vast majority of plants.

Hi, Tom After I scanned your article, the first thing I did was follow the link to the OSU research you cited. As I read through it, I didn't see anything different than what is contained in an article I wrote back in '94. The wording and discussion is actually so close to what I wrote, that I tried to find out whether that article was written after mine. I think that initially, adding a small fraction of perlite pumice, Turface, things that you usually consider as drainage material to a large fraction of peat, increases drainage, but only until the peat compacts/nests around the 'drainage' material. Perlite is normally included in commercially packaged soils at less than 10% of the whole. Doubling its presence isn't going to increase drainage or reduce the ht of the PWT, though it will reduce the total volume of water the medium is capable of holding. Illustration: start with 10 parts of fine sand that supports a 4" PWT. Add 1 part of BBs. Does the flow through rate change? How about the ht of the PWT or volume of air in the medium? Technically, on a per volume basis, there is a decrease in the % of air in the sand/BB mix compared to only the sand w/o BBs. All that changes is the 'volume' of water in the PWT. Peat may be slightly different because it's interlocking fibers may not compact to the degree that sand will, but remember that the fiberosity exhibits the same properties whether or not there is drainage material present. If peat compacts when there is no drainage material, it will still compact when there is. In order for drainage material to improve flow-through rates, it has to affect gravitational flow potential. In order to do that, it must great pockets where water molecules can adhere to themselves, increasing their collective mass. These large droplets then depend on cohesion to keep them together as gravity acts to move them down and out of the container. If drainage material can't create 'puddles and channels' within the media, it's not going to be effective. I want to comment on some of the things you mentioned as though we're conversing, so I'll make your offerings bold and my reply will be in default type: Drainage though is a bit of a false goal, or a goal based on an assumption. What we really want is to partially dry out the core of the mix at intervals between watering, which prevents that sour core-rot where roots won't live. My focus has always been on aeration, though I recognize the direct/converse relationship between drainage and aeration. The soils I build and suggest are based on the assurance that they will retain ample volumes of air for extended periods - that they are structurally sound. Of course, drainage automatically comes along for the ride. I don't think I would say "What we really want is to partially dry out the core of the mix at intervals between watering". My view is that there is no 'core' to speak of, because water that is not tightly bound to or in media particles moves down to occupy the PWT, which is actually the bane of most commercially prepared container media. Moisture locked in and on soil particles situated above water in the PWT moves quite freely through media by diffusion, so there is never a saturated 'core', only the PWT if the medium supports one. What we really want, is for the PWT to disappear as fast as possible, so a favorable volume of air can return to the soil ASAP. Roots in soggy media begin to die very quickly, often within a few hours or less at temperatures above 60-65*, so PWTs are a decidedly bad thing. Remember please, that here we are looking at media from the plant's perspective. I acknowledge that a PWT can be a necessity to accommodate our ability or our prioritization in terms of how often we can water, but that doesn't change the fact that media that do not support a PWT and need more frequent watering offer greater opportunity, within the limits of other cultural factors, for plants to grow to their genetic potential. That's an important consideration, because if we knowingly use a soil that supports a PWT because it's more convenient, we are sacrificing some degree of growth and vitality on the altar of that convenience. I try to build my soils to maximize water retention and still have no (or very little) perched water. The cyclic death and regeneration of fine rootage exposed to the anaerobic conditions of media that support PWTs is very expensive from the perspective of energy outlay. Energy that might have gone into blooms, fruit, foliage, or just increasing biomass, must be directed to root regeneration subsequent to each time we dare allow our planting to be irrigated to container capacity. Surely drainage helps and is good generally, but you are assuming it is the only way. I think you can see from my offerings that how I approach container media is more complex than only a single narrow perspective would allow. Al I've seen in your other posts where you refer to capillary action of soils as a negative. I couldn't disagree more. Capillary action is the savior of a soil mix; it's the vehicle that brings wet core water & water from the perched water table you described up to the drying surface, and balances moisture throughout the pot. It eliminates the perched water table. Peat has it and bark doesn't. I've never referred to capillary action as a negative. It just is what it is - the product of adhesion + cohesion - no more friend or foe than gravity or diffusion, which is something you didn't consider. Plants absorb water a molecule at a time, and water readily diffuses in media of large particles due to superior gas exchange. Here again, it's kind of a personal choice. You may prefer a soil with good wicking capabilities, but along with that comes the fact that the better they wick the more perched water they support. I, on the other hand, prefer a soil with good gas exchange (diffusion) and no PWT. The price I'm willing to pay is a strengthened watering can arm. ;o) Bark and peat feel dry to the touch when they reach about 40% moisture content, but plants can still extract water from media particles down to about 30-25%, so 'feels dry' isn't necessarily dry. There's a cush there. I understand what's required for wicking SWCs and how water retention in wick-irrigated media varies from media watered from the top, so we can save that talk for another time. Water starts to perch in containers when the soil particles are something just a little larger than .1". As particle size decreases, the ht of the PWT increases inversely. Whether or not bark holds perched water depends on it's size. Obviously, bark the size of Sugar Pops will hold no perched water, but bark ground to the consistency of peat will. Peat may initially hold more air and water than composted bark, but we all know that compaction is a considerable issue for peat; and conifer bark breaks down at roughly 1/4-1/5 the rate of peat, all cultural influences equal. I point to the fact that I always suggest partially composted or uncomposted bark in the soils I use, in sizes up to 3/8" to ensure no or minimal perched water. The grower can then add finer particulates as he/she sees fit to adjust the water retention of the media. When you start with fine particulates, it's very difficult to amend them to increase drainage/aeration, though as noted above, you CAN add materials like perlite that decrease the volume of water the soil can hold. It just makes more sense to me to approach this from the perspective of building a soil that holds no perched water, but is capable of holding an adequate volume of water in micro-pores, leaving macro-pores largely open, than it is to adopt a soil that, at container capacity, always has a significant fraction of available macroporosity clogged with water. Again, it has much to do with trade offs and what we are willing to do insofar as watering frequency (convenience), but the more highly aerated soil with better gas exchange, which occurs partially because we need to irrigate more frequently, offers better potential. I've grown extensively in both, and if the results weren't significantly better, I'd probably still be growing in a peat or compost-based soil. As always, YMMV. Good talking to you Tom. Al