Specialty Gardening: What kind of soil for my containers?, 1 by tapla

tapla wrote:
Buy pine bark that looks like what you see at 3, 6 or 9 o'clock below. Use 5 parts of it mixed with 1 part sphagnum peat and 1 part perlite. Add 1 tbsp dolomitic (garden) lime to each gallon of soil.

The concepts highlighted in the thread you were linked to are really much more important than the recipe. If I had to distill everything into a sentence, it would be that you can't build a highly aerated soil that supports very little perched water by starting with a large fraction of fine ingredients (like peat/compost/coir/topsoil/sand); you must start with a large fraction (75%+) of large particulates (like the pine bark you see below) in order to reap the benefits from superlative aeration and little or no perched water.

Al

This message was edited Apr 22, 2011 7:21 PM