Potting Soil

Weather: The weather continues to be difficult. The winds and low relative humidities in the afternoons made it hard to keep seeded areas "evenly wet" as the packets recommend. The low morning temperatures may have discouraged seeds, while the high afternoon ones prematurely ended the blooming times of flowers that like the more normal May weather.

Last rain: 4/8. Week’s low: 33 degrees F. Week’s high: 87 degrees F.

What’s blooming in the area: Austrian copper, yellow and pink species roses, Dr. Huey and hybrid roses, pyracantha, snowball, purple-flowered locust shrub, silver lace vine, broad leafed and narrow leafed yuccas, red hot poker, Dutch iris, peonies, Jupiter’s beard, snow-in-summer, purple salvia, datura

What’s blooming in my yard: Woodsii, rugosa and miniature roses, yellow potentilla, beauty bush, Russian olive, black locust, chives, vinca, Bath pinks, pink evening primroses, coral bells, golden spur columbine, blue flax, Johnson Blue geranium, catmints, sweet pea, Shasta daisy

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned more than once, I have no sense of color. So, instead of planting contrasting colors, I dedicated different parts of the yard to plants of a single color: reds/pinks, yellows, blues. I only planted whites along the garage after I saw someone’s house that had white trim on creamy navajo white stucco. Thus, it was a bit of a surprise this week to discovered how many flowers were white. The shrubs and trees hadn’t been planted by color but by function.

What’s blooming outside the walls and fences: Apache plume, tamarix, alfilerillo, purple mat flower, white tufted evening primroses, western stickseed, bindweed, greenleaf five eyes, fern leaf globemallow, scurf pea, alfalfa, tumble mustard, fleabane, common and native dandelions, goat’s beard, green amaranth; brome, rice, purple three-awn and June grasses.

Needle grass heads were waving in the wind on local grasslands.

What’s reviving: Buddleia

What’s coming up: Heavenly Blue morning glories and bachelor buttons planted 5/10; sweet alyssum planted 5/8; pigweed where the soil was disturbed to plant seeds

Tasks: In several of the market garden fields where plants had come up, men were out with hoes clearing irrigation furrows.

One man was putting out tomato plants on Friday. He always places white cylinders around them, probably cut from something like plastic gallon milk bottles. I suspect he has even worse problems than I do with rabbits.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, quail on back porch, small brown birds, geckos, bumble bee on beauty bush, sidewalk and harvester ants, hornets, other small flying insects

Saw my first brown, inch-long grasshopper. Before that I noticed the petals on the Shasta daisies were being eaten.

Weekly update: When I was putting in some bedding plants this past week I removed a pansy that had died. The soil was wet as was the outer edge of the root ball. Inside was a hard dry lump of potting soil that must have killed it.

I did my first such autopsy in Michigan when some azaleas died that had flourished for a few years. When I dug them up, I discovered the roots had never left the root balls. Instead, they had coiled and recoiled within their original habitat until they had starved themselves.

That was the last time I followed the instructions about disturbing a root ball as little as possible. I now look on potting soil as my enemy to be eradicated as much as possible.

Sometime back then, in the 1970s, some plants came in something resembling real soil, but most did not. Practically, there was only so much usable dirt available, and other mediums were adopted by nurseries. The pansy’s grower said a good growing medium contained "composted bark, peat moss, and other ingredients that do not include earthen soil." [1]

The soilless mixes were sterile which meant they were less likely to nurture fungus and other diseases. They also could pass state lines, and weighed less in trucks. The pansy grower’s headquarters were in Alabama.

When people grew frustrated when their bedding plants died, a new idea was promoted. Build a raised bed and fill it with similar potting soil and install drip irrigation with a timer to keep it wet. Theoretically, the plants’ roots wouldn’t notice the difference and would spread into the surrounding medium.

I wouldn’t know. I haven’t tried it. I’m sometimes tempted to ask the men I see behind me in checkout lines with bags of the stuff how they get it to work in this area.

I did once try mixing peat moss into the soil and found all it did was create a dry layer. If I watered, it absorbed everything from around itself, creating a larger dry area hidden underground. Now, I dig out the old potting soil when I remove dead plants in the spring.

The nursery industry became a closed system. Seed breeders adopted the same mediums to test their experiments, knowing they had to survive the artificial mediums used by commercial growers. It got harder and harder to buy seeds that would grow outdoors, under natural conditions of sun, rain, and garden dirt.

Somehow, this doesn’t make ecological sense. When I first established beds here, I put in layers of sand, manure, fertilizer, sawdust, [2] and local dirt. I assumed over the years it would mix itself. If I got time in summer, I threw out more composted manure and powdered fertilizer and let the water leach it into the soil below.

Then, like this past week, when I put in new plants, I removed as much of the potting soil as possible. The roots almost always exist only on the outside of the pots and pool at the bottom. There’s nothing in the center, no matter how large or small the container. The danger is killing the roots by mere contact or breaking them if they’re fine. The alternative is they will die anyway.

I’ve tried to kept to remember whose potting soil holds so little water that it’s hard to keep their bedding plants alive until I plant them. When I go into their nurseries, I’m often charmed by the beauty of the flowers, but I’m no longer tempted to buy anything more than I went there for.

All I can think is other people have better luck than I, although where those all those plants go I see in the big boxes remains a mystery. I rarely see bedding plants blooming in fronts of house in this area.

Notes on photographs:
1. Black locust, Robinia pseudoacacia, 19 May 2018.
2. Bridal Veil spirea cluster, Spirea vanhouttei, 12 May 2018.
3. Festiva Maxima double peony, Paeonia lactiflora, 19 May 2018.

End notes:
1. "You Must Use a Good Potting Mix." Bonnie Plants website.

2. I’ve since read sawdust was a bad idea because it would dry out and become a fire hazard. I think the author was discouraging its use as a surface mulch.