Today, I will showing you a simple and savvy approach to making your own Japanese maples and conifer soil. Anyway, what do you say? Let’s get down to business!
Materials I'll utilize:
I will utilize pine bark mulch. Two cubic feet, folks. If you ever see this material around, get it, collect it, store it, hoard it – whatever you want to call it, okay? Get this material because there are sometimes throughout the year where you’re probably not going to be able to find this. So, if you can find it, get it. Another ingredient that you will need is peat moss, guys. That’s about $20 worth of peat moss, and that one block of peat moss is going to last you a lot. It will make a lot of sacks of these. All you need is three of these 2-liter holders and one sack of this. You can transform it, you can add one extra if you accept it ought to hold to some degree more water. As of now, basically the whole of my Japanese maples are made with a soil mix that has one of these and four of these. OK, the current second, I will make a mix of one of that and three of that, and I will give it a preliminary And for the last material that you guys will need is perlite, guys. You don’t need a whole lot of this per pound. The fact that I have here makes this the most costly material. That is $5, that small pack. However at that point once more, you want about a portion of a pack, about around 50% of a sack of that for each one of that. Thus, to add all together, look, that cost me perhaps about $4-something. Let’s just say $5, let’s just add that, it was $5, let’s add $2.50, right? So, we’re already at $7.50, and a little bit of the peat moss, guys, maybe about a dollar’s worth of peat moss. So, that’s about $8, let’s just say $8 per one huge bag of soil right there. Keep in mind that the soil for Japanese maples and conifers is something that, trust me, you’re not going to find at Lowe’s, you’re not going to find at Home Depot, you’re not going to find at any of these places. If you grab a bag of soil from those places and you put your Japanese maple or your conifer there, well, here’s the proof, guys, ’cause I did that with this. Keep in mind, I did add a little bit of pine bark mulch to kind of break it down a little bit, and I did add a little bit of perlite, and I added even sand to get it to just to not hold that much water, right? But still, look, boom, disaster. Okay? I used a bag of soil from Lowe’s and now my Colorado blue spruce is dead, and the second one is on its way, guys. I thought it was going to leave, but I don’t think it’s going to make it, guys. The whole bottom part is already gone, and it’s working its way up. Okay? And that, my friend, is a sign of overwater. That soil from those big box stores, they hold too much water, and it is why I am showing you guys how to make the proper soil for your trees. So let’s do…
Mixing the materials needed to make the soil:
I these bags of mulch, especially if you’ve been storing them for a long time, are that white stuff, That is fungi.It is okay. It’s perfectly okay, guys. Don’t freak out, don’t believe that it’s poison, it’s going to kill your plants, it’s rotten or something, it’s not. Okay? That is fungi, guys. It’s growing in the bark mulch and it’s feeding and breaking down that mulch. It’s perfectly normal, guys. I’m going to add three of these…
This right here is what’s going to hold water, okay? You want to make a fair changed mix. In any case, three of these per two cubic feet. Without a doubt, cubic feet of pine bark mulch is abundance, people. I recently used a piece of a sack of this stuff on my past pack Okay, and the next step is the hardest step of all, and that’s where you get to mix it by hand, guys. Use gloves. Especially if you’ve got a significant other, come on, be polite. Guys, so first what I did right here is try to mix in the perlite first. Get it inside the material because the wind can blow. It’s pretty windy right now, so the next step is going to be, I’m going to dig my hands at the very bottom and just pull up like that and let it go, and that is going to mix it all together like that. Guys, that is it. So, this is my soil mix right there. It doesn’t have a whole lot of perlite in it. I found out that you really don’t need a whole lot of this stuff. My previous mix used to have a lot of perlite. So, just a little bit, you know, a couple of dots here and there, that’s good enough. Let’s give it a test, right? Let’s do this…
Testing my soil for proper drainage:
So, guys, what you really want is for the water to just literally just flush through the soil, okay? You don’t want any water here hanging around for a long period of time. Now, keep in mind that when the soil is really, really dry, peat moss will become a little bit hydrophobic for a very short amount of time, therefore water may hang around the top layer of soil until that hydrophobic effect runs out, which it should be fairly quick, and then water is just going to flush through. That is perfectly fine. In this case, I already got it wet, and water should flush through. Even if I were to, like, compact it a little bit, I would do this and kind of compact it, water should flush through. It just literally just went through the soil, and then that’s it, right? Look at that. That, my friend, is what we want in a soil for Japanese maples and conifers. So, let’s go back, we still got some work to do.
Packing the soil for storing:
So this is the final part. This is where I get to put my soil in the bag. And these bags are going to go somewhere where the sun doesn’t hit at all. You don’t want the sun hitting these bags. These bags are colored black, they absorb heat, and what happens is that the sun will break down that bag in a heartbeat, and you don’t want to find yourself in spring lifting up the bag and the bag just literally just breaks apart, and all your soil now is in the ground. Ask me how I know this. So, listen to me and put them where the sun doesn’t hit them at no point throughout the day, okay? So, I hope I made myself clear with a few pieces of advice on storing the soil. Lastly, you’re going to close this bag up, okay? Only one knot, you don’t want to put more than one knot here, okay? Reason is because if you need some of this soil, you can just get it and close the bag up. Next thing is storing the bag. You don’t want to store this bag where there’s where the sun is going to hit it. You also do not want to just throw this bag where the sun is not going to hit it, right? But then water is entering the bag, right? So, what you want to do is you want to remove all the air of your bag, just remove it all, right? Remove as much as you can. Make sure it exits the tip. Twist it that way, water doesn’t get inside the bag. Next bag that you do, put it on top of it, do the same thing, get as much of the air out as you can, roll it, and protect that opening at all times. Also, what you want to do is you want to place these bags not only in a place that the sun doesn’t hit and, if you can prevent it, in a place where the water is not going to hit either, but also in a place that nothing is going to hit these bags. Anything that hits these bags is going to make a hole in it, and if you don’t have these bags protected against the rain, against water, then water is going to start slowly throughout the winter, it’s going to start working its way inside this bag. The soil is going to start absorbing all that water, next thing, early winter, you’re going to want to use your soil for repotting, you’re going to lift it up, and the weight of the material is going to break your back, and all your material is going to end up on the floor. Thus, those are three things that you want to keep an eye out for: sun, water, and articles that might raise a ruckus around town and make openings in it. On the off chance that you can put these in a shed where they’re very much safeguarded, far better, you’re all set, correct? Other than that, I can’t, even though I got a huge shed, it’s always filled with other things. So, I cannot, I gotta put them outside where the sun doesn’t hit. So, that’s what I do.
I hope that you learned something today. You don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars on expensive soils that are made dedicated to Japanese maples and conifers. You can make it yourself for very cheap.
