Lately, I haven’t felt very inspired to pot the hundreds of seedlings growing in the greenhouse. It could be the newborn needing my attention, it could be the changing of the seasons, or it could just be that I simply don’t feel like it. So what do I do when I don’t feel like being productive in the garden?
I try to take things one step at a time. Does it look like I need more potting soil? Great, let’s tackle that task today. If I can complete that one step, I can get myself closer to the larger chore at hand of potting all the seedlings.
Making potting soil takes time. So where do I start? First, assuming I remembered to get the materials, I’ll soak the coconut coir bricks. I find that coco coir doesn’t like to soak water in colder temps, so if it’s a nice sunny day I’ll put my bucket of water out in the sun to soak.
Typically I get distracted during this task. Do the fruit trees need pruning now that it’s Fall? Should I feed the koi fish? It’s often when I am supposed to be doing something else that I get the most garden tasks accomplished…Actually, it’s always when I should be doing something else that I am the most productive.
So a few garden tasks later I remember that I’m soaking coco coir and I start making up the potting mix. I make my potting mix in bulk, so I use a cement mixer that I picked up at Harbor Freight to handle all my mixing. This mixer, although an ugly large bright red object that sits on my back porch taking up space and looking all aggressive, is a game changer. It makes my life so much easier and I highly recommend them to anyone making soil in large quantities.
I add equal parts of perlite and orchid bark to the coco coir. I usually buy bulk bags of perlite from Amazon and the bags are usually hit or miss. Sometimes the perlite comes really powdery as if it’s been crushed or sitting around for a while. I like to think that somewhere there’s a warehouse full of bags of perlite just decomposing and waiting all hopeful for some random person like me to order them.
I use Orchiata orchid bark that I order from Josh’s Frogs. I used to mix a larger and smaller grade orchid bark to make my own preferred mix, but now I just use the classic grade. It saves me time and is good enough for most houseplants. I also buy my bulk horticultural charcoal from Josh’s Frogs since it’s pretty much the only place to easily get it in bulk. For some reason, you usually can only find horticultural charcoal in the smallest of bags which is really quite useless.
I add about a quarter amount of charcoal and worm castings to the mix, and sometimes diatomaceous earth depending on what’s happening in the greenhouse. The biggest insect issues I have in the greenhouse are fungus gnats and ants. Ants always seem to like making homes in my larger potted plants. More often than not I’ll go to repot one of my specimen plants and see hundreds of ants scurrying away building a happy little home amongst the roots.
Most of the larger plants in my greenhouse are rootbound. Not because I think they grow better that way, although some seem to enjoy it, especially the monsteras who seem to like rooting themselves in the gravel. But because I simply don’t get around to repotting them that much.
Which brings me back to this blog post. Which honestly is something I started writing because I did not feel like potting my plants…