Dear angierainbow83, Please think about the info from Jodi and Al. I add my own story below. Since thinking through my own experiences will help me too, I hope you don't mind. I believe for me, I need to separate the garden beds from my containers; just as a two bedrooms can be used differently while still being a room, a separate approach to garden beds (to use Al's words, more "organic") vs. containers (more "inorganic") is still gardening. Good luck on your journey! Over the past few years I seem to be suffering from a case of harvest envy. Due to space and location, I do not have the ability to grow vegetables in the ground due to shade, but I do have a very sunny spot where containers work fine. I have "successfully" grown various vegetables (and am lazily including tomatoes in this category). I say "successfully" since I have never been able to come close to the level of harvest that neighbors get when the essentially identical plants with similar methods EXCEPT the plants are grown in the ground. In fact, I can say this with with confidence since I have provided them with their plants. I have experimented with various combinations of top soil, organic potting soil, compost and small gravel. (I won't go into nutrient supplements I have tried.) I have used about 15gal lightly-colored plastic pots raised off the ground. Given my growing climate, young plants move into these pots in early May and typically are taken down sometime after Columbus Day. The plants are still producing, but the colder temps negative influences many of the types I grow. In the case of eggplant, tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers, for example, my plants are 5-6ft tall and produce a crop not quite sufficient for a small family throughout much of the season. When I take the pots down at the end of the season, I typically find the exterior soil to be damp/dry while the center below the stem and near the main roots to be very wet. Further, there are many small roots near the soil surface, possible due to the thin mulch layer I applied (thinking I needed more moisture retention). There are some larger roots that spread in the pots, but not a tremendous amount. The best fruiting, distribution and size of roots was in the year where I only used organic potting soil without a mulch cover. Although I can't say with 100% certainty that by making the soil more organic I caused this problem since from year to year I changed conditions (and growing conditions change too), the evidence is pretty well stacked against me.

Ideally, all the ingredients should be right in the area of 1/8". The reason for this is: as the size of soil particles approach 1/8", the perched water that finer soils hold disappears. If you have 2 of the 3 ingredients that are the right size (in the neighborhood of 1/8"), the third ingredient can be larger w/o impacting the drainage characteristics significantly. I'm not going to tell you you have to screen the ingredients, but I DO. I remove all the 'fines' by discarding what passes through insect screen or a kitchen strainer. It does make a better soil. I have to laugh. It's slow at work, so I went home today to get my soil screens & took 5 bags of Turface & a bunch of tubs to the shop for my guys to screen. I occasionally use a little of the Turface fines in specialty soils, but mostly I use them (or donate them for use) in hypertufa troughs/pots/planters - GREAT for that. It was warm and sunny (until around 2PM) so the guys didn't mind being out in the fresh air at all. I don't know what to tell you about making the bark smaller. If you have access to a chipper, that works. I never have a problem finding bark in appropriate sizes, so I think if you keep looking, you'll eventually find a less labor-intensive product. Al

Actually the Farfard #52 is considered a reasonable replacement for the gritty mix, not an additive. I would feel comfortable using it in its entirety for a potted JM - I use a prepackaged soil mix very similar to that myself for all my JM's.The other Farfard mixes that are usually available in retail outlets don't quite measure up in terms of quality and durability. Can you ask your source to special order the #52 for you? If unable to take this shortcut with the Farfards #52 and continue on with your homemade gritty mix, I'd persist in my quest for bark fines. Using another soil mix is just not an appropriate substitute. Bark fines can often be found under the label of "soil conditioners" - and they do not have to be pine. You can also often find them sold in pet stores as reptile bedding ( at a pretty inflated price, btw).

Great post. I tried this method this past weekend. Relative to the lawn mower method of chopping up large pine bark chunks, I found this method to be cleaner (it doesn't shoot pine chunks out the sides like a mower will), a bit slower than the mower, and produced a lot more fine particles. I have a high speed Toro leaf blower/mulcher with a metal impeller. A large percentage of the particles coming out felt like fine compost, and a large number of chunks went through looking unscathed, so I didn't get the mix of particle sizes that I was hoping for. I suppose if I had a 1/8" screen, I could have sifted out some of the fine stuff. As it was, I got about 3 gallons of material, and made a side batch of 5-1-1 to try with some peppers, but I didn't mix it in with the rest of my 5-1-1.