What's up everyone?

What's up,

what's up?

What's what's up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. We are joined

again by Paul of Aaliki Gardens, which is a local to me, San Diego Soil Company that focuses on creating really high quality soil mixes that support either a regenerative agriculture or a no-till style approach to farming.

So we've been talking quite a bit about style approach to farming and gardening.

So we've been talking quite a bit about some of the finer details

of creating soil mixes and the interactions of all the different variables that

go into what makes up what we call soil.

And another topic that I thought we could dive into, Paul, is something called bulk density.

So I thought, of course, with any of these things, it makes the most sense to kind of explain what that term even means to start it out.

Yeah, thanks Kevin. One of the aspects of our of our soil formulation is checking the bulk density.

And what that means is how dense is the media that you're growing in.

Will it allow for the infiltration of water? how does it affect root depths or restricted in some cases?

We consider how does the bulk density affect the water holding capacity like we talked about yesterday, the

soil porosity, the availability of plant nutrients and the soil microorganism activity.

All of those would be affected by bulk

density and with the soil sites the way bulk density is calculated there's an

assumption that rock like a solid rock is 2.65 grams per cubic centimeter.

And so when you're taking a look at field soils, the ideal growing soil for most fields would be a

filthy loam. And so that would be a mix, a pretty even mix of sand, silt, and clay.

And so when you're making potting soils

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