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soil Spent Soil

gasificada

gasificada

Well, after pulling up some plants today I had a nice surprise:

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My pots were loaded with 'em!

I also had another surprise that wasn't as nice:

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Damn curl grubs! Not many, but enough! After raging at them for a bit, I promptly picked them out and "disposed" of them.

But anyway, I am left with this:

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A big ol' box of spent soil and I'm wondering what I should do with it. After all, it should be worth something considering all it's wormly goodness and all that, right!?

Any suggestions? I'm thinking either using it to add to my soil blend for my raised beds when the time comes, building it up with some goodies like compost etc and reusing next season as potting mix, or starting a compost heap with it. What do you all you think? (Help this newbie out!)
 
We've got grubs really bad down here this year. Anywhere I dig I find them, and any pot I look in they are there. I fed one to a giant orb web spider I've got in the yard yesterday...

As far as the leftover dirt goes, I just spread mine into either my garden, or into the rest of the beds around the yard. Unless you way over fed it and made it to hot, or had some sort of disease issue with the plant that was in it it shouldn't give you any problems.
 
J762 said:
We've got grubs really bad down here this year. Anywhere I dig I find them, and any pot I look in they are there. I fed one to a giant orb web spider I've got in the yard yesterday...

As far as the leftover dirt goes, I just spread mine into either my garden, or into the rest of the beds around the yard. Unless you way over fed it and made it to hot, or had some sort of disease issue with the plant that was in it it shouldn't give you any problems.
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I fed the birds with the ones I found. ;)

Yeah, one of my plants *may* have had a bacterial spot issue (not sure) but I'm gonna chance reusing the soil anyway. It wasn't until after I had already tipped the soil in with the rest that I realized what I had just done. :eek:

I'm kicking myself now but we'll see what happens (and fingers-crossed I won't be kicking myself even harder somewhere down the track!)
 
If you have a composter, you could throw it in there to recycle it. You need to be a little careful with bacterial diseases since some of them are spread by rain splash. Therefore, throwing them back into a garden could just spread it around more. If you've had some disease issues, I would recommend treating it before re-using it in any way. Just a suggestion...
 
RedtailForester said:
You need to be a little careful with bacterial diseases since some of them are spread by rain splash. Therefore, throwing them back into a garden could just spread it around more.
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That's why I am kicking myself. ;)

Is there any way of treating the soil without killing any nutrients that may still be present? And I don't want to kill my worm friends either!

I'm hoping it was just burns on the leaves of the affected plant and not actually bacteria.....
 
Oops, sorry I just read that part. Not too sure on that one. If you use hydrogen peroxide or something similar to sterilize it, you are killing off the beneficial microbes in the soil as well. Just keep an eye on it and keep your watering to a minimum to prevent any spread.
 
ok gassy dude,

you will always have some sort of nasty bug, microbe, or virus
in your out door grows.

you will need to tolerate a certain amount of the "bad" things to allow the
"good" things to grow. it is just how things are please try to find a nice
working level of toleration for all things.(no, you can still try to kill off any thing you do not want)

you can try using a hot type of composting strategy to kill most weed seeds
look into composting your food scraps and such

i am making a bokashi with my table scraps and all and feeding it to my worms in my ghetto style worm bins

you can make your own compost at home and it is fun, use your old "spent" soil
as a component of your "new" custom GASSY compost.
 
I have a large trash can that I add my old soil to each year. The can does have some worms growing, but I have a dedicated worm bin in the garage that I focus on. I usually pick up a few bags of manure and place them in the trash can when I add my old soil. The large amount of manure ends up getting the soil very hot and kills a lot of the things you don't want to grow.

This is what I use to refill my worm bin trays when they are ready to rotate. When I have compost ready to go into the worm bin I fill the new tray with the trash can soil, add in some grass and paper shredding. The worm bin is a 7 tier so the new tray gets added to the bottom. By the time the tray makes it way up to the top (several months) It's usually nice and dark full of nutrients. I then use that compost in with my new soil when I pot up and start new pots. I also use this compost to make "worm tea".

Since I usually end up with a lot more compost soil I also give some away to friends and family close by who garden or would like to make a batch of fresh worm tea.

It works for me since I only grow in pots and don't end up with a lot of stuff in my soil at the end of the year.
 
:think: Hmmm, some interesting ideas!

I have read before that "heating" it is always the way to go. The only thing is, I still don't want to kill my little worm friends! Will "heating" it by adding manure affect them, LGHT? And if so, will it matter that I have a big ol' bunch of dead worms in my mix? I'm still so new to all of this! :lol:

I love the idea of my own custom compost, nitwit, but that name, I dunno.... makes it sound a little, uh, unpleasant! (But then again.... compost ain't supposed to smell like a bunch of roses, right?) :lol:
 
dude your avatar is picking it's nose(and it has been for a while)
a bit of fart laden compost may be a step towards more proper etiqette (sp?)

as far as the bad smelling compost, try to do a dogpile search for "bokashi"
http://www.dogpile.com/dogpile/ws/results/Web/bokashi/1/417/TopNavigation/Relevance/iq=true/zoom=off/_iceUrlFlag=7?_IceUrl=true

it does not HAVE TO smell bad (and neither do your gaseous emissions) :woohoo:
 
manure will heat your compost a bit, but I don't think it will heat it up to the point will it will kill the worms, however if your looking to "sterilize" your spent soil, adding compost probably won't heat it up enough to sterilize it either. Since I only grow in pots that are placed either on cement or wood I'm really not that worried about killing anything in the soil, but Flakes said you could also remove the worms do something to sterilize your soil then put them back.

As far as compost goes I allow my kitchen scraps to sit in my kitchen for weeks and never had a problem with smells. I do however keep all old scraps in sealed plastic bags and that goes into a sealed bin under the kitchen sink. I also don't put in any meat or fish products that will rot and stink either.
 
Yeah, after doing a bit of research, it turns out that good healthy compost is NOT supposed to smell bad! Whodathunk!?

Thanks for your input, guys!

I can feel this is going be one of those subjects where after I actually go ahead and try for myself, I'm gonna feel like an idiot for asking so many questions! :lol:
 
i've heard some ppl heat their spent soil in the oven in large trays and then mix it with compost and manure and perlite/vermiculite to create soil for next year - bit of a long process if it's a lot of soil but basically cooking it kills everything that could cause harm... seem to make sense in theory but never tried this and I think I have too much soil to bother with this of thing - will add it to the garden (not vegie section in my case) and hopefully wont kill the natives because of too much fertilizer (will only sprinkle a bit around a large area)
 
I dump my pots full of used growing medium into a good sized kid's pool. To that I'll add perlite, compost, soil conditioner (Happy Frog stuff), worm castings and humus. Good to go for another season. I also test the pH level a few times during the season, make sure the plants can get the available nutrients.
 
patrick said:
I dump my pots full of used growing medium into a good sized kid's pool. To that I'll add perlite, compost, soil conditioner (Happy Frog stuff), worm castings and humus. Good to go for another season. I also test the pH level a few times during the season, make sure the plants can get the available nutrients.
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Sounds like a plan, patrick!

I've since changed my mind about starting a compost heap for now and will simply build it up to reuse next season.

Great idea using a kid's pool too! This last season I've been using an 80L container and it has been a PITA! It would be nice to be able to mix more than 60L max (so as to leave room to actually mix!) at a time.....
 
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