Soil Mixing Balance

Hi, I'm Danny Botkin from Laughing Dog Farm. Today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about about mixing soil. So to produce large numbers of beautiful food seedlings early in the season we need some good soil. And there's a lot to the science of soil, but you...you might know that it's also an art as much as a science. So, we're going to be mixing various ingredients into this wheelbarrow to come up with the most rich potting soil that we can to give these valuable, heirloom vegetable seedlings a extremely fast and robust start. So what do we need to know about mixing soil? Well, essentially, soil is made of clay, silt and sand, three different sized particles. Depending on the combination of the clay, silt and sand in your soil, you're going to have a soil that either is well-drained, or not so well-drained, or down right water-logged. A good soil is a combination of...of particle sizes, so you have your sand, you have your silt, you have your clay, and then you have organic matter. So when we mix soil, we're going to want to bring into the equation organic matter, nutrients in the form of a manure compost, and then something to bulk it up. Something to give it body, that the plants can grow and send their roots into.