What is up everyone?

Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast.

Today we've got another guest.

I'm really excited to have them on Dr. Bethky, who is a soil scientist and he's a consultant for Pitt Moss and Pitt Moss is a new sustainable

growing media made out of organic recycled paper.

I'm actually using some of it right now in my worm bin which hopefully we'll be able to talk about this week.

But for today's episode we're actually going to do a bit of a rewind and we're going to talk about potting soil in general and specifically sort of the evolution of

potting soil and so I guess the first question I have Dr Bethky is what do we mean

when we're talking about the evolution of potting soil?

Well, I'm the perfect one to talk about that because I started working in potting soil when I was eight years old,

and you're dealing with a man on this end of the phone that's 70 years old and so I can there's not only been the evolution of fine soil but there's been the evolution of the researcher.

When I was a little boy at 8, my dad had a greenhouse and we made potting soil out of field

soil, a little bit of compost and some muck and various things we could dig out of and get people

to bring us out of ditches and things.

And that was the standard of potting soil back then.

That was the early, what I'll call the first paradigm.

It was the way we produced it, we would put materials on the wagon,

mix in some fertilizer, mix in some different things we thought,

stir it all up and use it as a potting soil.

And then we would also steam, sterilize it,

heat it with steam, and that would be the excellent potting soil that we would use.

That was the standard for greenhouses and garden centers and people to use in special planter

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