Hello everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. This is Kevin from Epic Gardening and today we're going to address a soil science question. So the question is this, what is garden soil and when should you use it?

So when you're at a garden center, maybe a home depot,

wherever you end up getting your garden soil or your soil amendments,

you will probably have seen the words garden soil printed on one of the bags.

And you might confuse that with topsoil, potting mix, etc.

And it's not the same thing.

So the real question becomes,

what are the differences between garden soil

and other types of soil?

So the first thing that we have to understand is it's different

from topsoil. Unlike topsoil, something that's in a bag and it's called garden soil

is usually pre-mixed. It's a soil product that is intended to be added to

existing soil in a garden or flower bed. So garden soil, the specific makeup of garden soil usually depends on the type of plant that you are going to grow.

So they might have a flowers and vegetables garden soil, they might have a succulent garden soil,

and so on and so forth.

So topsoil, what is topsoil?

Topsoil is harvested from the first foot or two

of the earth, and then what happens is they will shred it and they will

screen it to remove any debris any large stones or any large sticks from it and

so then what they'll do is once it's nice and loose, they sell it in bulk.

But topsoil is not the same everywhere around the world. It might be sandy, it might have clay in it, it might be silty, it might have some other

regional minerals and micronutrients that are more concentrated in one area versus another.

...