How I Make My Cactus and Succulent Potting Soil

We'll make up some cactus potting mix now. First thing I do is I've got some soil in a five mil sieve and we'll sieve that and take the extraneous stuff out of it. Why cactus mix manufacturers fill their products up with great piles of tree bark, you'd really wonder until you discover that it's very very cheap and that's why they do it. All right I'll put a bit more in and break up pieces and sieve it and I'll show you the difference. That looks like it's not too bad, there's not too much stuff in it but look at the size of the the bark I got out of that. Right another one and then this will be the the first part of the operation. Sieve that, turn it around, get all the bark and rubbish in there. Okay that's our five mil sifted soil. Next step is I'll put all that into another tray and get that over to there. Put our original tray back and what we're going to do now is we're going to sieve this soil mix down to three mil and that'll get rid of some more of the chunky bits of tree bark. So turn that around because you want pretty fine soil and we're going to mix that with pumice, 60% pumice and 40% of this fine soil. All right that's what we've taken out, rid of that, put the last lot in, dip it into the sieve, sieve it again, turn it around, let all the little pieces drop through while we're holding the big clunkier stuff on the top there and I reckon that is about it and that's what we've taken out of it and that's the first part of our mix. We have to measure out how much we want of pumice to make our mix and we use 60%, 40%. We'll start off with some soil, the pumice will sit on top of it but we're going to use a full one here, make sure that's up to up the speed, there's a full one, one of soil, top that up to make sure we've got enough soil in it. All right that's two, three of pumice, this is one to seven mil pumice so it's the right size that we're looking for. We're going to want three of these actually, there's one, fill our measure up again, that's two and I'm going to have to break out another bag I think, no I think we're going to go pretty close, here we go, last dribble in it, there we go, three. Now mix that up, just keep turning this over until we get it mixed in relatively well. I use this kitty litter tray because it's a good size for mixing your media in, if you get bigger trays and stuff you end up with huge amounts and it's pretty hard to get it mixed in homogeneously. It's looking pretty good at the moment, making sure there's none along the edges that are mixing, no that's looking pretty good. All right so there's our mix, conifidum bilobum, you can see the six or seven flowers that have died off on there, the last ones here, it's looking a bit a bit shonky, it's not going to last very much longer but it is a lovely yellow flower, that plant will be broken up pretty soon, there's too many pieces in it, we'll separate that into a couple of different plants.