My soil less potting and seed starting mix recipe - Plants love it!

Here is how I made my own soil less mix recipe. It's very easy to make and it seems that seeds love to germinate in this mix. It is said you should avoid starting seeds, (or certain seeds anyway), in native dirt/soil because of bacteria etc that can kill the seed - damping off it's called.

You only need a few things to get started:

1.) (4) 5 gallon buckets with lids

2.) Bag of vermiculite

3.) Bag of perlite

4.) Bag of sphagnum moss

5.) 1/2 to 2 pounds worm castings (optional)

Pour each ingredient into it's own 5 gallon bucket.

Use a measuring cup to take equal  parts of each product and pour into the last bucket. (If you choose to add the worm castings do not need a bucketand shoud be stored somewhere else.) This is your completed soil-less mix for starting seeds or using as house plant medium. You can even use this as hydroponic medium if you has a netting to hold it together.

2.5 pounds of worm castings total after 3 months

Here is a photo while we were harvesting our worm castings. We got a total of 2.5 pounds of worm castings and have since started to make worm tea, used the worm castings in our indoor garden and have mixed the worm castings into a home made soil mix consisting of perlite, vermiculite, peat moss and worm castings.

Raised garden beds now have seeds and small plants planted!

It's almost hard to believe that we now have something in our raised garden beds. I built both raised garden beds a few months back and have waiting unpaintenly to  plant anything in them  for soooo long! Now that the harsh Arizona summer weather has moved along, we can actually go outside and work in our new raised garden beds. Here are some photos depicting as best I can, how we layered our garden bed soil and what went into the mix and why.

A quick reminder of the size of our raised garden beds:Raised bed #1 is 10' x 3' x 18"
Raised bed #2 is 20' x 3' x 18"

First thing we did was to add close to 1"-2" of newspaper along the bottom of the raised bed for a carbon source.

Next we added some alfalfa hay to the raised garden bed. For this 10' x 3' raised bed we used about half a bale of alfalfa hay to cover the newspaper.

After adding the alfalfa hay, we added a few good shovel scoops of our very own compost! We were excited to use this compost since we started  our own compost pile some time ago in preparation for our raised garden beds.

Then it was time to add the worms! We added about 40 Canadian nightcrawlers to each raised garden bed to help work the soil for us as well as give us those great worm castings the plants love. We should be able to keep this raised garden bed soil moist enough to have these Canadian nightcrawlers live for and reproduce for years and years.

After adding our garden soil mix to fill in the raised beds and cover our worms, we added some bone meal and blood meal for a nice organic fertilizer boost. We mixed the bone and blood meal into the top 3"-4" of our raised beds with a metal rake.

The final step in adding the soil to our raised garden beds was to give it good soaking with the garden hose. Although we were spraying the garden bed with the garden hose after each layer of mix, it's a good idea to really wet it down after the layer is completed. This help the soil mix settle and let's you see any low spots you may need to level out.

Next thing on the list was to install our soaker hose that will water our raised garden beds evenly. This was done the following day since adding the soil to the garden beds took a while to do...it's not that I'm lazy, but see how long it takes you to shovel 10,000 lbs of soil mix into a wheelbarrow then shovel it into a raised garden bed, lol!!!!!!!!

Finished adding the soil to our raised garden beds!!!

We have finally finshed adding the soil to our raised garden beds! I was able to locate some looking anf feeling garden soil mix at a local yard. Can you believe we needed almost 10,000 pounds of soil!!!

I will upload a bunch of photos soon with all the information as to what I added to our garden soil mix. As for now,  I'm installing the soaker hose and will be adding seeds, plants and flowers in the next few days. The best thing about our timingwas that we were hit with a lot of rain last night which thoroughly soaked our raised gardens! Could'nt ask for anything better than that :)

Well stay posted for the pictures of our Arizona raised garden beds!

We will be starting our raised gardens this coming week!

Many people claim that you should have your raised garden beds going by now, however we waited for our extreme Arizona heat to pass. If you've been keeping track on our Arizona weather you will know that we have been setting new record heat temp.'s for quite some time. If Arizona didn't  break a heat record, we tied it or came within a few degrees! This summer has been a very HOT summer without much relief. With this in mind, we decieded to hold off on planting anything in our raised garden beds until the heat broke; next week should be the time to plant.

Here is what I'm going to do with our raised gardn beds as far as the soil:
(I have two raised garden beds about 10' x 4' x 18")

The bottom of the raised garden bed will be covered in 1"-2" of newspaper.
Next layer will be a few inches of alfalfa hay.
I will be adding about 1' of natural soil on top of this with a bunch of earthworms and kitchen scraps mixed in.
After this I will be adding our entire compost pile that we have been building up for a few months.
To top off our raised garden beds I will be filling the rest of the bed with "garden soil" from a local rock supply yard.
(Depending on what is in the "garden soil" from the rock supply yard,  I may be adding in bone meal and blood meal.)

I believe this combination will provide us with great tasting produce. Please comment if you have any suggestions :)