Substrate, wooden boxes, pond baskets & colanders

Trenthany

Chumono
Messages
868
Reaction score
674
Location
Arcadia, FL
USDA Zone
10A
@Japonicus, it seems like you've gotten a lot of good advice regarding soil mixes and components. What i do hope you are seeing in this thread is that you can save a lot of money by mixing your own. I just picked up 7 gallons each of red lava and pumice. They are screened and clean and of the most amazingly consistent size and absolutely no waste. None! Total cost $14. Way better than the bags I used to get in San Diego, which had about 25% dust. So at my club, a guy sells akadama for $34 for 17 liters (4 gal. Give or take?) and another sells diatomite rock for $30 (25 lbs. roughly 20+ liters). So total we're talking $112 (2 bags of akadama) in materials for over 27 gallons of mix. So you can see how much money you save by mixing yourself.

The bonus is you can vary it a little to suit different species or trees. For my deciduous I throw a little fine bark and extra akadama. For a big heavy tree more pumice and less red lava. For a cascade, may add a little decomposed granite or fine pebble to help keep the pot heavier. Lots of options and way less money.
+1 to this! I spent $78 dollars and replicated Wigart’s basic mix pretty close(They’re right down the road. No shipping maybe $10 in gas?). Got a set of classifiers a while back and sorted by grades into buckets. Put buckets into wheelbarrow to make mix. After mixing back into buckets. I came out of it with:
15gallons potting soil(muck, peats, compost, and fines, basically anything that could be in soil was sifted and all the fines went into that mix) it’s amazing.
10 gallons, 1/8-1/4” sized bonsai mix (beatty’s, bark, lava, 1:1:1 and a little perlite I had just because).
15 gallons, 1/4-1/2” sized bonsai mix (none came close to 1/2” but that’s my clarifiers mesh size so just being open)(beatty’s, bark, lava, 1:1:1 and a little perlite I had just because).

As “waste” I got 5 gallons of bark, muck chunks, etc that didn’t go through 1/2” mesh, none of which was bonsai substrates. All of which is mostly organic and will go into composter to kick it up a notch.

TLDR, buying ingredients, sifting and mixing myself put my price at approx. 20% of retail prices of an amazingly affordable mix ($35/5 gal.) that does well in FL. As a bonus I got 15 gal. of amazing potting soil from collected swamp muck, used potting soil etc all gifted to fines with the fines from my substrate added. Took less than 2 hours to sort around 50 gal. of material.
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom