You're welcome. Thanks again, for being so kind. Some thoughts I offered in another, older threads on this forum. They should pretty much answer your question, and may even be quoted in the text somewhere up this thread (if so, I apologize for the redundancy): In my estimation, the only case to be made for reusing container soils is one of economics, and you'll never find me argue against making that decision. If you can't afford, you can't afford it. That said and setting economics aside, you might decide to reuse soil for reasons other than economical. Perhaps the effort involved with acquiring (or making your own) soil is something you might not wish to go through or be bothered with. In any case, it would be difficult to show that soils in a more advanced state of structural collapse can somehow be preferred to a soil that can be counted on to maintain its structure for the entire growth cycle. So, if the economic aspect is set aside, at some point you must decide that "my used soil is good enough" and that you're willing to accept whatever the results of that decision are. All soils are not created equal. The soils I grow in are usually pine bark based & collapse structurally at a much slower rate that peat based soils, yet I usually choose to turn them into the garden or give them over to a compost pile where they serve a better purpose than as a container soil after a year of service. Some plantings (like woody materials and some perennials) do pretty well the second year in the same bark-based soil, and with careful watering, I'm usually able to get them through a third year w/o root issues. Watering habits are an extremely important part of container gardening. Well structured soils that drain well are much more forgiving and certainly favor success on the part of the more inexperienced gardeners. As soils age, water retention increases and growing becomes increasingly difficult. If your (anyone's) excellence in watering skills allows you to grow in an aging medium, or if your decision that "good enough" is good enough for you, then it's (your decision) is good enough for me, too. The phrases "it works for me" or "I've done it this way for years w/o problems" is often offered up as good reason to continue the status quo, but there's not much substance there. I'm being called away now, but I'll leave with something I offered in reply on a recent thread: "... First, plants really aren't particular about what soil is made of. As long as you're willing to stand over your plant & water every 10 minutes, you can grow most plants perfectly well in a bucket of marbles. Mix a little of the proper fertilizers in the water & you're good to go. The plant has all it needs - water, nutrients, air in the root zone, and something to hold it in place. So, if we can grow in marbles, how can a soil fail? Our growing skills fail us more often than our soils fail. We often lack the experience or knowledge to recognize the shortcomings of our soils and to adjust for them. The lower our experience/knowledge levels are, the more nearly perfect should be the soils we grow in, but this is a catch 22 situation because hidden in the inexperience is the inability to even recognize differences between good and bad soil(s). Container soils fail when their structure fails. When we select soils with components that break down quickly or that are so small they find their way into and clog macro-pores, we begin our growing attempts under a handicap. I see anecdotes about reusing soils, even recommendations to do it all over these forums. I don't argue with the practice, but I (very) rarely do it, even when growing flowery annuals, meant only for a single season. Soils don't break down at an even rate. If you assign a soil a life of two years and imagine that the soil goes from perfect to unusable in that time, it's likely it would be fine for the first year, lose about 25% of its suitability in the first half of the second year, and lose the other 75% in the last half of the second year. This is an approximation & is only meant to illustrate the exponential rate at which soils collapse. Soils that are suitable for only a growing season show a similar rate of decline, but at an accelerated rate. When a used soil is mixed with fresh soil after a growing season, the old soil particles are in or about to begin a period of accelerated decay. I choose to turn them into the garden or they find their way to a compost pile. Unless the reasons are economical, I find it difficult to imagine why anyone would add garden soils to container soils. It destroys aeration and usually causes soils to retain too much water for too long. Sand (unless approaching the size of BB's), has the same effect. I don't use compost in soils because of the negative effect on aeration/drainage. The small amount of micro-nutrients provided by compost can be more efficiently added, organically or inorganically, via other vehicles. To boil this all down, a container soil fails when the inverse relationship between aeration/drainage goes awry. When aeration is reduced, soggy soil is the result, and trouble is in the making. I've mentioned before that I don't post here to get people to convert to a particular mix or blend of soil. I post what I know will work very well for anyone who can get appropriate ingredients & modify the mix to suit their climate & other cultural conditions. If you use a mix that guarantees good aeration for the expected life of the planting - you're in good shape. Most peat based mixes will not work well in extended life plantings. Conifer bark based mixes, on the other hand, retain structure for much longer periods. If you still have questions, please don't hesitate .... Al

Hello, Has anyone gained any insight on this topic over the past year? I'm trying to figure out how to set things up for the season and would like to move many of the containers off of the deck and out to the edge of the yard. The containers are multiplying so rapidly that space on the deck is becoming limited. Last year the routine was to add the fertilizer concentrate to the watering can, fill it inside with tepid water, carry it out to the deck and water, then repeat as needed until all the plants are happy. The new location will be on the other side of the yard, which is too far to keep running back to the house to fill the 2 gal. watering can. I'm considering getting an EZ-Flo fertilizer injector which feeds into the hose bib. Then 150 ft. of hose (I still have to measure that to make sure) and a watering wand should do the trick (can anyone recommend a good watering wand?). The plants are primarily conifers, maples, and chile peppers, and my concern is the water temp. As others have noted , water from the hose bib is cold even in the summer - will this have implications on the plants' vitality? I'm especially concerned for the peppers. Plan B is to get a reservoir (probably a garbage can, but it could be a rain barrel), install a hose bib near the bottom, and place this in a shaded location near the plants. I envision sitting the reservoir on a table for ease of accessibility. I might have to fill a watering can, I don't know if it would generate the pressure to use a watering wand. Fill the reservoir with water and in a day or so I'll have a source of water at ambient temperature. Ideally, one could add fertilizer concentrate to the can, but in practice though, the can doesn't have a tight lid, and evaporation will result in concentration of the contents. On the other hand, there's an adapter you can get for the fertilizer injector to allow it to function in low flow applications (think drip), and that might be applicable. Plan B requires somewhat more work, but does not have the cold water liability. Also, what with the reservoir up on a table, I wonder what will happen when that big storm rolls through. I'll make a decision soon so I that can buy what I need. I'd be really interested in any additional info on use of cold water in the summer. Also, I'd love any feedback on Plan A or Plan B, or any other alternatives. Alex

I've used .5 gph and 1 gph drippers on a timer. I've never had one clog up - maybe if your water is super hard? I ran the system all the way from the back of the house to the front - starting with my neighbors potted plants, my plants planted in a narrow strip along the back fence, everything I had planted on the south side of the house, across the front of the house (flowers) and the hanging planters I had on the front stoop. Worked great. Saved my neighbors plants as well as my own. I think I had it on a 30 minute timer - might have been 20 mins. I think I had a flow limiter as well. There was probably a screen at the input end as well. I got the parts at WalMart in Sidney OH - no other WalMart I've been to carries them. I'm sure other WalMarts do have them, just not where I was living at the time (WV, my dad lived in Sidney, so I bought the parts when I was visiting up there). I plan to set something similar up after we move in a couple of weeks, though I'm not sure where I'll get the parts yet. BTW I'm pretty sure it was Orbit - I could get tubing and parts separately so I could get just what I needed instead of having to buy a pre-packaged kit with too much of this and not enough of that, LOL!

Imagine a jar full of pudding or fine sand. In your mind's eye, start adding perlite to either. Does 1 perlite particle make a difference in drainage or aeration, the properties you would be seeking to improve with the addition of perlite? Of course not. 100 pieces? No. 1,000? No. There is a level at which perlite starts to make a notable difference in the properties mentioned (aeration/drainage). It's called the threshold level and it's established at the point when there is no longer enough sand or pudding to fill all the air spaces between the perlite particles. Even in the mind's eye you can see that it takes a very large fraction of coarse material and a small fraction of fine material to make a notable difference in drainage/aeration in most cases. That's why you can't effectively amend soils based on fine particles by adding even a pretty healthy measure of pine bark or perlite.If you end up having 75% pine bark and the rest of the 25% fraction comprised of equal measures of peat or potting soil + perlite, you're not amending the peat or potting soil with bark - you're amending the fraction that's larger by far with the ingredients that in combination make up the lesser volume of 25% If you start with a gallon of Miracle-Gro potting soil and add 1 gallon of pine bark and/or perlite to it, have we created notably better aeration or drainage? No. Even at 2 gallons of bark and perlite there is still enough potting soil to fill all the large air spaces between the coarse material - so little gain. At 3 gallons of bark and/or perlite, when there is not enough fine material in the gallon of potting soil to fill the spaces between the large particles, we start to make notable headway. This is why you can use 3 ingredients that when mixed together CAN make an extremely productive, root-friendly medium, and mix them in such a way that the end product is almost unusable. Soggy mediums are particularly problematic because they make Ca unavailable, not to mention the fact that the low Oxygen levels accompanying soil saturation also cause iron and manganese to become electron acceptors, which leads to their precipitation, and even though these elements might be present in soils, the plant’s inability to assimilate them. Al