Urban gardening or small-space gardening in containers is on
the rise! And the number of people growing plants indoors is also on the rise.
The most important aspect of container gardening is the potting medium used,
because this, along with light and moisture will be the most important factor
to help your plants grow healthier and disease free.
I never use the commercial potting mixes available, which are infact too expensive.
I rather prefer to make my own homemade potting mix recipe for both my indoor
and outdoor plants
Now, lets start looking at the ingredients we use to prepare our indoor soil mix, one by one. We will list out the formula or the recipe with the proportions of each ingredient used, shortly.
- Garden Soil: This forms the major component of an outdoor potting soil recipe because one of its major functions is plant anchorage which is very important for outdoor plants which can easily knocked down by strong winds. We will use garden soil in our indoor potting mix too but in smaller quantity.
- Cocopeat or Peat Moss: I prefer cocopeat because its easily available and inexpensive and has a neutral PH. Plus mixing this with garden soil removes the compactness of garden soil and makes it well draining. This forms the major ingredient of our indoor potting mix. Its available as a compact brick or in powdered form. The coco peat brick can be easily reconstituted into cocopeat powder by mixing it in water. One brick of about 5 kgs will give you a large volume of upto 75 liters of cocopeat powder.
- Compost: like vermicompost or decomposed cowdung or horse dung powder or both. Compost manure is an essential component of any potting mix to provide the major and minor plants nutrients like the NPK – nitrogen phosphorous and potassium along with the trace elements. We have already discussed this in our previous episode on the basics of indoor gardening.
- Neem Cake Powder: This is optional. But adding this will take care of any fungus and harmful bacterial growths and protects your plants.
- Bone Meal Powder: This is again optional but very useful if you are growing vegetables or flowering plants indoors under grow lights. This will induce flowering and fruiting if mixed in potting soil.
- Perlite, Vermiculite or Pumice: All these serve the same purpose of making a well draining potting mix plus adding a good aeration system for roots. Among these Vermiculite should be cautiously used, because it holds lot of moisture and can rot you plants especially succulents. Vermiculite can be used for water loving plants like lucky bamboo and others. Pumice and Perlite are the best options. Among these two, the main drawback of Perlite is it gets crushed into powder if you use it along with too much garden soil and in this case pumice is the best if available. Garden Pumice or horticultural pumice is available in various grades or sizes and it does not get crushed unlike perlite. You can find the links to purchase these items online in the description below.
Now quickly, before the formula
or recipe, lets know the difference between Potting Mix and Potting Soil.
Potting Mix is simply a mixture of all the above ingredients minus the garden
soil. That’s means it is a soil less medium. On the other hand, Its called
Potting soil when you use garden soil in the mixture. That’s simple! But most
often these two terms are used synonymously.
Well, here in this recipe, considering the importance of plant anchorage, we
will use garden soil too but in small quantity.
Now lets look into the actual recipe of this indoor potting soil.
- Cocopeat forms about 40 to 50 percent of this mix.
- Garden soil about 10 or 20 percent.
- Perlite or Pumice or both about 20 percent
- Compost like vermicompost or Cow dung compost or a mixture of both 20 percent depending on what you want to grow. For veggies and flowering plants, you can increase this to 30 percent. For ornamental plants 10 to 20 percent is sufficient. This can also be added later on to the top layer of the soil – a handful of it per container once or twice in a month.
Optionally you can add 5 percent bone meal plus neem cake powder.
Cocopeat is a natural fibre made out of coconut husks. The extraction of the coconut fibre from husks gives us this by-product called cocopeat. Cocopeat is a 100% natural growing medium. This cocopeat dried in the natural sun, are processed to produce different items namely cocopeat block, cocopeat briquettes, cocopeat disc and so on.. This makes an excellent growing medium for hydrophonics, or container plant growing. Clean coir has natural rooting hormones and anti-fungal properties.
Now, The various Benefits of cocopeat :
The properties of Coco Peat make it resistant to bacterial and fungal growth.
Coco Peat holds water rather than shedding it like traditional peat does! It holds 8-9 times its weight in water.
Coco Peat has the ability to store and release nutrient to plants for extended periods of time. It also has great oxygenation properties which is important for healthy root development.
It has a pH of 5.2-6.8 which is neutral to slightly acidic. This makes it great for alkaline garden soils.
Easy to use! Just put your compressed Coco Peat brick in a container, add 4 quarts of warm water and let it sit until the water is absorbed, fluff it up and you are ready to use Coco Peat!
Coco Peat can even be reused for up to 4 years!
It makes a great bedding material for worm bins! It’s actually good for them and increases worm growth by 25%.
Coco Peat is very slow to disintegrate; it only begins to break down when it is 10 years old, long term benefits.
It is very light and easy to handle.
It can be combined with any of the normal ingredients and use as a mixer or a stand-alone product.
An affordable price for a quality product with an environmentally sustainable future.
Now,,
How to use a Cocopeat Block Brick?
Cocopeat is shipped in compressed form to reduce transport and handling costs. Converting cocopeat blocks to coir dust is easy. All you need to do is add water to the block and the block will puff up into moist fluffy cocopeat. Just add sufficient water to the block to make sufficient quantity of moist cocopeat. You can put away the unexpanded block for later use.
If you need to expand the whole block, immerse the block in a large tub capable of holding at least 25 litres of water. Remove the wet expanded cocopeat that floats in the water, while continuing to add water to the tub till the complete block is expanded.
If you are a large grower who needs to expand large number of cocopeat blocks, place the cocopeat blocks vertically with a distance of about 1 feet between them. Spray water from a hose on the cocopeat blocks while working on the blocks with hand to expand them into moist cocopeat. Another method is to use machinery to crush the block into powder and then use the dust.