Hello! Sorry to leave you last week holding on to your potted plants! You can put them down now!
Today we’re going to talk about what to put in to those pots as you repot all of your captive, root-bound houseplants.

A good, general, all-purpose soil mix for houseplants might consist of equal parts of:

• sterilized soil

• peat moss

• coarse sand

• a teensy bit of dolomitic limestone

Now let’s analyze this type of mix.
STERILIZED SOIL – that’s regular good old garden soil, loose loamy dirt, good sterile soil.
That’s dirt that you bake in your oven at 160º for about 4 hours or so! You can bake it at 350º if you pop in a potato. As soon as the potato is done, so is your dirt.

Good news – all of the bad stuff is dead after you bake it. All of the insects, bugs, germs, disease – no more – all gone!

Bad news – that dirt-baking process really stinks! Your family will not want to eat at home that night, and maybe the next!

The next ingredient to this houseplant mix is PEAT MOSS. This is the ingredient that holds the water. It’s derived from sphagnum moss, sometimes called Canadian peat, from peat bogs in Canada. It’s usually dark brown to reddish in color.

Peat moss can also come from sedges and reeds. Then it is black in color, and is called humus or Michigan peat. Can you guess where Michigan peat comes from? At any rate, Michigan peat has a finer texture than the Canadian sphagnum. This finer humus is very useful in mixes for ferns, begonias, African violets, and other plants with delicate root systems. Peat moss is important because it can absorb water up to 15 times its own weight! And its fibrous root system is able to hold that water for nice and slow release to the plants’ roots.

SAND is still another basic houseplant potting mix ingredient. Now – that’s not beach sand, and it’s not sand box sand – these two are way too fine! These two sands will only compact with the other soil mix components. These fine sands will block aeration and prevent necessary drainage. The proper sand that you will want to use is sharp, coarse sand. You can find this type of coarse sand at builders’ supply houses. (And just when you thought that you would have to go all the way to the Hawaiian beaches to collect your sand!)

The last ingredient in this basic mix is DOLOMITIC LIMESTONE. Very simply, dolomitic limestone is lime that has been ground from the mineral dolomite. This dolomite is used to alter a soil’s pH, making the soil sweeter, less acid. It helps bring the soil closer to neutral. Dolomite is a combination of calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate. This lime is needed to sweeten that basic house planting mix, because the peat moss tends to be on the acidic side. So one tablespoon of lime for every quart of peat moss is usually sufficient.

Keep in mind that the basic mix of sterilized soil, peat moss, sand, and lime can be varied. You can even add some rich homemade compost for even more organics. And you can always change the proportions to suit your own particular houseplant. Your repotting mix should come as close as possible to the texture and the content of the soil that your plants was used to growing in up to this point.

The more peat moss - the heavier the mix - the wetter the mix. And some plants love it this way! You know who you are!

Increase the sand to one half of the total mix, add some small pebbles, and all of your succulents, all of your cacti will love it!

Now if you don’t want to pot around will all of these components, then there are always the commercially prepared potting soils, designed for your particular houseplant. You know there is always a price tag for this convenience.

You can always skip the real soil mixture that we’ve talked about, and the commercially prepared stuff, and go with a soil-less mix. This stuff is germ-free, insect-free, and sterile. It’s made up of Canadian sphagnum peat moss, and either white, popcorny volcanic perlite, or shiny flecky vermiculite. This type of potting mix is also available in many of the garden places in convenient small plastic bags. For those of us who use this kind of soil-less mix to start or garden seeds, the larger 3.8 cubic feet of compressed soil-less mix is needed.

And that is exactly what I’ll be using this weekend, as I start some of my garden seeds. Hey, let’s talk seed starting next weekend!

Remember – Eat Smart New York!

And – Bye – Talk to you soon!

D