Hello everyone welcome back to the epic gardening show I hope you enjoyed yesterday's

episode with Jane Perone of on the ledge podcast I had a lot of fun going on that

and I'm very grateful that she had me so if you

are interested in what she talks about which is a lot more of houseplant care

and things like that definitely go check her podcast out today I going to do a little freestyle riff on potting

soil. So I learned recently from a good friend of mine Stephen Cornette who I'm

sure if you're a listener to this podcast you've probably heard me talk about him

before. He shared with me his

potting soil recipe which I'm going to test out this year see if it provides any

different results and so the basic thing we're talking about here with potting soil is making your own versus buying, right?

So he's a big proponent of making his own and part of the reason for that is he's trying to grow as much as he can for a market garden and use as much as many of his own inputs as he

can on the farm and now you know as a gardener that's up to you whether you want to

do that or not and the way he does it is I'll give you the quick recipe and then I'll go

into the details. So the quick recipe is this, one-third Pete Moss, one-third

coarse and medium-grain perlite, and 1-third compost.

Now that sounds very simple, so of course the purlite is there for aeration,

oxygenation, the peat moss is there for water retention and the

compost of course is going to be there for some organic matter and some

fertility in that soil. But here are the twists. First of all, what could we substitute? Well you could substitute pumice and rice hulls for the purlite if you can't get purlite in your area.

You could substitute coconut quar for the peat moss if you either don't want to use

peat moss for an environmental reason or you just would prefer a coconut quar

that's completely fine you can do that and then for compost, it's a bit difficult to substitute out for

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