Actually if you mix some of that crappy Miracle Grow Potting mix that is on sale everywhere now it will probably work nicely with the stuff you bought. The MG Potting Mix I bought last year was mostly peat moss which will lighten your blend. I had to do just the opposite last year by adding bagged garden soil to the MG potting mix.

I’ve lightened soil for pots with perlite and vermiculite, so I think that should work. You’ll just have to experiment with how much until it doesn’t feel as clumpy as it did straight out of the bag. :-)

gardengal48 and Perma n’ Posies , Thank you so much! I feel so much better now! I'm glad you told me about the vermiculite because I am not an expert gardener in any shape or form. When I bought it, I heard vermiculite was good for airing out and lightening up the soil and for helping the soil hold onto the added nutrients and soil amendments. I figured it would help potted plants so that the added plant food and nutrients don't drain out of the pots and can stay in the pot longer so the plants can uptake those things more readily when needed. I read so many different things on the internet about different kinds of soil amendments that it confuses the heck out of me sometimes, lol.

I have bone meal, blood meal, earthworm castings, Down to Earth Organic Rose & Flower Fertilizer Mix 4-8-4, 5 , garden lime and something called Tank's Green Stuff 100% Organic SuperMix Fertilizer which is very expensive and gets rave reviews from gardeners. I really like the ingredients in Tanks Green Stuff! Tank's 100% organic compost has: Heat Treated Chicken Manure, Bat Guano, Calcium, Zeolite, Gypsum, Biochar, Soy Meal, Feather Meal, Blood Meal, Kelp Meal, Trace Minerals, Seaweed Extract, Humic Acid, Worm Castings. ( N: 2 P: 2 K: 1 )

If the soil mix is heavy and not light and fluffy, I'll add some peat moss and perlite in to lighten it up a bit.

Besides the peat moss and perlite, Is it ok to mix a little of the stuff I mentioned above in the soil too? If yes, how many cups or teaspoons should I mix into the soil and add to each 15 gallon pot? I want the soil in the pots to be light and fluffy and filled with lots of good stuff for the roses.

I found the ingredients that the soil has: aged fir bark, fir bark, sawdust, composted green waste, peat moss, redwood sawdust, alfalfa meal, fishbone meal, bone meal, feather meal, kelp meal, kelp flour, dolomite lime, gypsum and wetting agent. My guess is that there isn't a huge percentage of those ingredients in the soil. It's probably mostly sticks/wood. Thankfully, I also found a write up where the company said this particular planting mix is also "designed for Indoor and outdoor containers". After I read that I felt relieved.

Thanks so much again for your help and advice. I appreciate you both so much!

lkayetwvz5, I hate MiracleGro and big box store soil and fertilizer/compost products so much! When I first started gardening I thought when I used to buy them they were the best brands. Then I started reading about these big box store soils and felt like I was duped because most of that stuff is chemical laden, industrialized crap. I noticed a lot of stores like Walmart, Lowes in Home Depot stores, the bagged soils are kept outside and when you get them they stink like mildew and mold from being kept out in the rain and they get soil gnats and have lots of other bugs in them including aphid eggs.

A few years ago after I purchased a soil named Kellogg and one of their other soil brands and amendments that they were selling at Home Depot, I was pissed. I thought I was getting good soil and soil amendment products. Instead I found a few articles on the internet where people were saying that these companies get a lot of their soils from landfills and it even had human feces in it because some of it came from municipal waste facilities (municipal sewage sludge). People were even finding metal nuts, rocks, screws, glass, plastic, bolts, nails, metal and other garbage and debris in the bags of soil including brands such as MiracleGro.

After I read that I also noticed that I was finding the same type of debris in my bags of big box commercial soil that I was using for my container roses. They all ended up doing great at first, but ended up not being able to thrive or survive for long because the so called "potting soil" was as heavy as cement, got compacted very easily and was filled with sewage sludge. I even tried to amended it with some good "natural" stuff. Where I live, big box stores reign supreme and even if you try to buy your soil and soil amendments at local mom and pop nurseries they often do not have the better natural, organic products in stock or are constantly sold out because a lot of cannabis growers grab as many bags of the best stuff out there, lol.

Yuck:

https://www.prwatch.org/news/2011/05/10700/dont-be-duped-sewage-sludge-industrys-compost

http://ecopeaceful.com/blog/gardening/item/73-products-labeled-as-organic-with-gmos-sewage-sludge-toxins

synchronicity1111 - I actually made the same mistake, if you want to call it that, 3 years ago - 8 bags of the same soil from Ace. I did try to lighten it with a lot of perlite and vermiculite and thought it looked fine but learned it was too heavy by the end of the season and found it was very compacted when switching it out the following year. If you are able to, I would suggest getting any potting mix over this. To give yourself time to save for more potting mix, you could always pot them up in 5 gallon nursery pots for a couple of months and once they have established decent roots, transfer them to the 15 gallon pots.

synchronicity1111, I wouldn't recommend using any of those products with any containers. Not because they are bad....they would work great on any roses planted in the ground........but they just do not function as intended in a potting/container soil mix. The reasons are complicated and probably more than you want to know but dry organics (which all those appear to be) cannot be processed well in a container situation so most are NOT taken up by the plants and are just wasted. And the plants suffer because they are not getting what they need to thrive.

Instead use something like Osmocote. Or any water soluble fertilizer mix (even the MG blue powder has what you need). Or a great many container gardeners swear by the Dyna Gro products, like Foliage Pro or GROW.

Ace hardware has a messed up back end on their website, they don’t update it or something because the things that are available on the website are not really in their orderable stock. I’ve tried ordering things on their website and it’s never right. I think if you call a store to order they can order the right things for you.