Hi, I’m Mitch Baker with American Plant Food.

Now, that we’ve selected our container for our container garden, we’re going to mix up our potting mix. Now, you can use a potting soil, something that’s pre-mixed, ready to go. That’s fine, lots of these available in garden centers and hardware stores, but I’m going to mix up a soil blend.

But, we’re going to start first with some pine bark nuggets to take up some room in the container. These plants are going to fill this container with roots. So, we don’t need to have soil filling the container. It also makes it a little lighter if you want to move the container around. So, we’ll use some pine bark nuggets to take up some room in the base and then we’ll put our soil blend on top of that. We’re going to fill it up about one-third with pine bark nuggets and we’re going to use our composted blended soil amendment, so that we get that biology in our soil mix.

Then we’re going to add some additional particle matter with pine bark fines or pine bark soil conditioner. Then we need to blend those together. What we want is this nice loose soil mix, so that we have some of that composted blended soil and some of the pine bark fines. That particle matter increases porosity of the soil, incorporates more oxygen into the soil. It certainly improves the drainage. So, we’re not filling this pot all the way to the top because we’re going to fill it with plants, we got to allow some room for the plants. So, now we have our soil blend in there, the next thing is to choose our plants.