A Gardeners Forum Forums General Discussion The Food Garden Forum What type of dirt...

Alright, so here's the situation...

I've got about 60 plants in my garage that I let soak up the sun during the day. They're almost all in red party cups and many are going to need to be transplanted in the next 2-3 weeks.

I'm going to need a lot of dirt for this...

So far I've been using Miracle Grow Moisture Control, but it's going to be pretty expensive to buy a whole host of $10 bags for that...

What alternatives could I look at using?

Top Soil bags are about $2 for the same amount, but it's obviously not going to be nearly as high of a quality. Maybe I could make my own mix relatively cheaply?

I'm in Florida, so taking "dirt" out of my backyard is out of the question too.

Oh, also, I'm hoping to grow them in containers.

The $2 topsoil is good enough if you add to it. I'd say find some bags of manure, well rotted, and mix it up about 1 manure to 3 parts top soil. Then add some slow release fertilizer to your mix too. It will be much the same as the Miraclegro without the price tag.

You only want to increase the size of containers about 1 inch per transplant from what I've learned. So one large bag of miracle grow would make up the difference between this container and the next one easily. I did 60 this spring in 8 oz yogurt cups and had a lot of soil left over.

So the question is what size will the final containers be?

What kind of plants are you growing?

pH, and nutrients requirements change based on the type of plant so without that information it's hard to give you good information.

Don't !! use just top soil.
The top soil doesn't retain moisture, it drains well.. but too well
I used top soil in my planters and watered every day. When I harvested some taters the soil was too dry. I pretty much flooded these to make sure they were getting a good soaking to stay moist but with the top soil being so fine (sandy) mix it just runs right through it and dries out.

Im going to do what was mention above ...mix manure in, also add some peat...decomposed leaves from the woods to give the soil nutrients and water retention.

snow

At Lowe's we can get bags of cow manure for $1.37 a bag and I put a little of that in each of my containers. Seems to work well.

As Sheda is growing mostly vegetables (pictures from another thread), moving them from her cups to the full sized containers intended on using is the best for her. I agree with all that you are saying.