What is up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. Today we're going to talk about

reusing old potting soil. So I'm deep into writing the book right now. The deadline is

August 15th and this is a section that I wanted to add in my little container

gardening section of the book, the Field Guide to Urban Gardening. container gardening

so potting soil is something that we've talked a lot about how to make but once you're done

growing in it for the season the last thing you want to do is just throw that in the trash because that's going to go into

the landfill, it's going to just be completely wasted, and it's 100% possible to refresh and reuse old potting

mix. The only thing you have to do is make sure you follow a relatively simple

process to get that potting soil rehabilitated and ready for new growth. Now first let's talk about some reasons why you may not want to

reuse your potting soil. So one is if you've grown an extremely heavy feeder

like something like tomatoes you can reuse that soil but it's probably a good idea

not to grow tomatoes in it again because of just how much nutrition they pull out of the

soil. However, let's say you have five gallon bucket of tomatoes that you've

harvested out and you want to figure out what to do with that soil. What you can do is you can grow

beans, beans, beans, anything like that with a little bit of this refresh process that we're going to go into.

The second thing you should consider is if you suffered any soil-born diseases or pests,

so maybe you had root not nematodes or maybe you had some sort of

disease that you just want to make sure 100% that you are not going to pass on.

Well, one thing you can do is actually heat the soil up to the point where it would kill off all those bacteria and what you're doing there is you're mimicking the process of hot composting where you're getting it up to about 160 degrees Fahrenheit. So you can do that if you want. If you want to be extremely

safe, you can actually just throw the potting soil into your hot compost pile and let it just

go through that process and mix in with all the other stuff that you're composting. But what about

if you're comfortable reusing the soil how do you do it? Well the first thing you'll want to do

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