How to Refresh Your Vertical Planter Container Soil Quickly & Cheaply: Vertical Gardening Series E-1

Welcome to the Rustic Garden Homestead. Today I want to show you how to get your vertical planter ready for growing. We're going to just do a quick setup, nothing fancy. Now a couple things to keep in mind. First question I always get, do I have to dump out my container mix, add in new container mix? No, absolutely not. You never have to throw away your container mix. Way too expensive to do it that way. The other question I get is, do I have to dump it out, refresh it, put it back in every year? You don't have to. I recommend about every three years taking your container mix, dumping it out. I have a video on it. I will put it in the video description. I also have a video on how do you make a container mix to save yourself money. But if it's been in there about three years, you do want to dump it all out, add some compost, some amendments, fluff it all up, put it back in the container. However, maybe the mix that you have in there is only a year old or two years old. This is two years old. There's no need to dump this out. First thing you do, just come in. You're going to weed it, of course, and then you want to fill the pockets really about this high. And I've already gone through and done that. Any bagged soil product, compost, whatever you want to use is fine. And I mean, I'm sure you understand it. Like up here, maybe we could add a little bit more. Just throw in your extra material. And then we'll put some over there too. Once everything is kind of leveled out, weeded, we go into just dropping in some organic granular fertilizer. I just did a video on this about a week ago on what organic granular to buy. Bottom line is whatever is really the cheapest. But I will link that video in there. And you can take, I don't know, a tablespoon, two tablespoons, about this much. Just sprinkle it in the top of the pocket. So I'm going to do that for all of this and then I'll show you the next step. So I went through each pocket, make sure it was weeded, brought the soil level up, and then put in one tablespoon, maybe two tablespoons of the organic granular into each of the pockets. Now I just want to be clear again because it can be confusing. If this is three years old and it looks great, just keep it in there and do the process that I'm showing you. But anything that's been in here one or two years, you can do this process. When I get to the third year, maybe the fourth year, I do dump this all out and I amend it with compost and peat moss. But you don't have to do that every year. This is just a quick way to get this set up when the soil is a little bit younger. So once you have everything pretty much ready to go, you're just going to take a shovel and you're just going to mix it in. Nothing fancy. You are trying to get in there, break up any root balls. Maybe you had something with a big root system growing in there and you want it to be nice and loose. And, you know, do that for every single pocket. All the pockets were loosened up. Real quick, the fertilizer I used has a 3-4-4 NPNK, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Again, you just need an organic fertilizer that has NPNK represented. And I do recommend checking the video out in the description. It will save you a lot of money. There's no reason to buy fancy organic granular fertilizers that are all the same. Just make sure NPNK is represented. So everything has been loosened, fluffed up. Next step, we're just going to water this in with any water-soluble fertilizer. I recommend AgroThrive. I'm associated with them and you can find their link in the video description. The pockets here on the north side are a little bit frozen, so you obviously want to do this when your container mix is not frozen. Next week, the temperatures are coming out of the 20s, nights in the 40s, days in the 50s. This is going to be all planted up, if you want to follow me, with cool weather crops, lots of leafy greens, and I'm going to be putting strawberry plants in here too. So the next step really is just water this in with that water-soluble fertilizer. Any water-soluble fertilizer is fine, but what I wanted to show you is just how quickly to give it a drink. Just like one, two, three, move on to the next pocket. One, two, three, and that's all you really need to do for this vertical planter to get it ready for growing. That's plenty of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. Now we're going to want to add in some fertilizers in the water-soluble form over the season, but this is ready for planting. You could plant right away because you're just using basic organic fertilizers that are not going to impact the root system, but you're ready to go. The spring season is just about here. We're coming out of our heavier freezes and frosts here in Maryland. Please subscribe and follow me. I'll show you how to grow all kinds of different crops in these vertical planters. I'm affiliated with Greenstalk Garden. This is where I get my towers. Check out the video description. These are all my strawberries. I have a video coming up to refresh this and just, you know, to save you a minute of watching a video. They're just going to get water-soluble fertilizer. That's it. Nothing fancy. Of course, I got trimmed back and all that, but water-soluble fertilizer is your best friend when it comes to vertical gardening and when it comes to growing in containers. Thanks so much for watching. Please check out my seed shop at therustedgarden.com and just remember if your soil is one year, two year, three years old, you don't need to dump it out. Refresh it. Put it back in. You can just do this method and it'll be plenty of fertilizer and nutrition for your plants to grow. Thanks so much for watching.