Making my own soil-less mix (aka Faux-Mix)
Not everyone has access to Pro-Mix, but most towns have a Home Depot nearby. Here's my attempt at making a Pro-Mix HP copy.
First lets start with the ingredients:
1 - 3 cubic foot bale of Peat Moss
1 - 2 cubic foot bag of Perlite
1 - 6.75 pound bag of Espoma Garden Lime
I'm making 20 gallons worth of soil-less mix. The kind folks at Premier Tech Horticulture tell us that Pro-Mix HP is 65-75% Peat Moss, the rest is Perlite. I'll measure out three 5 gallon containers of Peat Moss and one heaping 5 gallon container of Perlite. That will give me approximately a 70/30 mix of Peat Moss to Perlite. I compact it with my hand as I fill each 5 gallon grow bag. I want to make sure I have enough to fill each pot after it gets wet and settles.
Next I'll hydrate the Peat with some water. Peat can be hydrophobic (repels water) when its moisture content drops below 30%. Mine was real dry so it took plenty of wetting and hand mixing to get it all wet. In hindsight, it would probably be easiest to do wet and mix in stages, like every 5 gallons of Peat added.
Now its all moist. Hehe, I love using the word moist and how it sets some people off.
Now its time to add the perlite. Here's the heaping 5 gallons of Perlite.
I pour the Perlite over the 15 gallons of moist Peat and mix it in by hand.
Time for Lime. Researching plenty of .edu (University websites) on how much Lime to add to a soil-less, Peat based mix, I find a consensus of 2 tablespoons for every gallon of soil you desire to make. I am making 20 gallons, so that's 40 Tablespoons or 2 1/2 cups worth of Lime.
I sprinkle in half the Lime and hand mix it all in. I wore gloves at this point since Lime can be rough on exposed skin. After it was sufficiently mixed, I repeated the process.
At this point I filled my 4 grow bags. I had a little left over, which is better than being short. I ran about 3 gallons of water through each with the garden hose to make sure it was all good and wet and to get the lime working. The fine folks at Premier Tech Horticulture also tell us on their website that it takes Pro-Mix about 3 days of being wet for the Lime in it to stabilize the pH of the media. So I'll let it sit for a couple days before using. My seeds haven't sprouted out of the Jiffy plugs yet so that's just fine. It took me about an hour and a half to do. Cost was about $38 for the materials. There should be enough Peat Moss for 2 batches, Perlite for 3, and the Lime will go a long way (guessing 5 or so).
haha see what I did there.
