P.S. Sorry I ruined custard for everyone.

Please forgive my gardening ignorance but what is "smart pot"? I'm sure there will be many humourous explanations and I look forward to reading them but I don't have a clue what this is.

As to your question, it isn't soil. Personally, I'd consider it to be compost but according to the definition of compost from the NOP guidelines, it would still be considered to be manure.

Lloyd

Lloyd

P.S. Kind of embarrassed I didn't just google it right off the bat. Normally I would have but I didn't have a lot of time this morning. My bad.

Not necessarily. Compost is just mostly decomposed organic matter - doesn't have to be any sort of mixture of ingredients although home composters find mixtures tend to be more efficient in arriving at a "finished" product. I'd consider 2 year old manure just well-aged manure unless it looked just like soil and no longer resembled the original product and with no manure-like aroma.

Regardless, I think the point is fairly moot if you are talking about creating a soil mix for any kind of container planting. You do not want ANY kind of compost as a major player in a container planting mix. Too moisture retentive and too prone to continued decomposition and collapse. Much the same reasoning behind not including garden soil in such a mix. A durable, textural, more woody based and freely draining mix is much more preferred and will produce much better results.

Save the compost/manure for the garden, NOT the container plantings :-)

And I'd take their comments about overwatering never being a problem with a very large grain of sand :-) Overwatering can always be a problem, regardless if you garden in hard sided containers, raised beds, smart pots or in the ground (unless your soil is pretty much pure sand).

There's a somewhat unique twist to the OP's application though - the Smart Pots. How you use your Smart Pots will largely determine what soil structure is appropriate. If the smart pots are sited on top of the soil, so the earth below acts as a giant wick, you can use heavier soils that skilled container growers would consider inappropriately water-retentive in conventional containers. The reason for that is, when you rest the containers on the soil with the earth acting as a wick, you've turned the grow bags into a miniature raised bed; this, from the perspective of hydrology. If you site the containers on a non-porous surface, like concrete or a deck, then you need to consider them as you would a conventional container, and any mix comprised of any combination of the list above will be excessively water retentive.

Container soils aren't about what the soil can provide in the way of nutrition. You can very easily take care of nutritional needs much more efficiently than you ever could by relying on the soil to provide; this, by simply ignoring the nutritive value of the soil and instead concentrating on the soil's STRUCTURE - on its ability to to provide the most favorable ratio of water:air for the life of the planting, and selecting an appropriate fertilizer that offers the assurance you're providing all the essential elements at all times. It's important to remember it's just as important to have air in the rhizosphere (root zone) as it is to have water. W/o ample amounts of air in the soil, the roots cannot function normally and the plants suffer.

In many cases, the limiting effects of a poor soil go unnoticed, with growers contenting themselves with the results they are used to. Unless they actually SEE how much easier and more productive it is to grow in soils that are well-aerated and support little perched water, they have no basis for comparison. Thousands of people (literally) have come to understand the importance of air in the root zone through their reading here at GW. So far, I haven't seen any turn their back on well-aerated soils once they have tried them. The few that might have and have returned to commercially prepared peat-based mixes undoubtedly put a very high premium on grower convenience, prioritizing it in queue ahead of what is best for the plant.

Al

I have never used a Smart Pot personally but I would always opt for a more textural and very freely draining potting soil for any kind of contained planting system. Just my opinion :-)

GG

I too, think there is a widely held misconception that because something works well in our gardens & beds, it should follow that it must also work well in our containers. While 'rich and black' may be coveted adjectives when used to describe the soils in our gardens and beds, it can sometimes, if not usually, be an undesirable quality in our container media.

Phrases and terms often the subject of discussion when referring to the soils in our gardens are often irrelevant when it comes to container media. Phrases like "feed the soil ...." might more aptly be replaced with something like "guard the structure ...." when it comes to container culture. The populations of soil organisms that break down the organic components in the soils making up our gardens and beds, break down the structure if our container media just as readily - so are they desirable or even necessary at all in container culture? The answer is a resounding 'NO', and we need look no farther than hydroponic growing to see that the soil life so coveted by all (including me) in our gardens & beds is unnecessary at best and counter-productive at worst, as their consideration applies to container media.

When it comes to media for containers, if the grower directs his primary focus toward the soil's structure, that is to say toward drainage, aeration, the ht of the PWT, and to the soils ability to retain that structure for the intended life of the planting, he will be better prepared for achieving the goal of better yields and more attractive plants.

I've grown plants in media based on many dozens of combinations of components; among them are compost, manure, peat, coir, topsoil, sand and others equally fine. Some will be surprised, others not, but the easiest and most productive soil I have ever grown in for conventional containers looks like this:

a soil comprised of 2/3 inorganic particles. Still though, this soil has a much larger organic fraction than most of the soils in our gardens and beds at 1/3 by volume ..... so the soil pictured above has a larger organic fraction than your garden soils - food for thought.

The above soil is followed closely in the categories of easiest to grow in and most productive by the pine bark-based soil seen at the center here:

This soil is nearly ALL organic. At a 5:1:1 ratio of pine bark:peat:perlite, it is about 86% organic, has excellent drainage and aeration, and should retain those properties over the life of the planting because of the durability/longevity inherent in pine bark as the primary ingredient.

Al

I planted William Shakespeare rose in 100% MiracleGro potting soil. He did not like it. I had better luck with pots when I filled the bottom with loose pebbles.