Growing Indoor Plants in Garden Soil – A Test
Growing Indoor Plants in Garden Soil – A Test
Recently, I did a little experiment where I attempted to use garden soil to make my own potting mix for indoor plant use. Then I decided to do a test to try growing houseplants in this soil, and see how it performed against commercial potting soil. A few months have passed, so let’s take a look at my results at attempting to grow indoor plants in garden soil.
Preparing Garden Soil for Indoor Potted Plants
If you’d like some detailed background on how I sterilized and prepared my garden soil for use indoors, visit my article, Making Potting Soil from Garden Soil where I discussed my first attempt at this, and why I wanted to try it. I used a boiling water method to sterilize the soil and added some vermiculite to try to make the soil less dense.
I wasn’t thrilled with the results, as the soil came out gray, dry and powdery with lots of big, hard clumps. Frankly, I was pretty sure that this soil was not going to grow anything very well, but I decided to go ahead and try an experiment with a couple houseplants anyway and compare how plants grew in this soil versus a good potting soil. I was extremely surprised by the results.
Garden Soil vs Potting Soil – An Experiment
I started with a couple small spider plants that I first got rooting in water. They were very close to the same size, and I planted one in the potting soil (Espoma Organic Potting Mix), and the other in the garden soil. Here they are immediately after planting:
I put them in the same window and always watered them both together so they would have the same overall conditions aside from their soil. After several months, they now look like this:
I was REALLY surprised by these results. The plant in the garden soil grew significantly better than the one in the commercial potting soil. Granted, growing a sample of only two plants wouldn’t be considered statistically significant or a real scientific study, and maybe spider plants are a weird outlier that happen to like this type of soil whereas other houseplants might struggle. Or maybe there is something wrong with the commercial potting soil I’m using (the plant in the potting soil barely grew at all).
Regardless, the outcome was positive enough to make me want to do some more experiments and try growing some other indoor plants in garden soil. Later this week the weather is supposed to be very hot, so I plan to make a solar cooker and see if I can sterilize soil that way rather than using boiling water. And then I want to try using that soil to grow some different types of houseplants. Check back for updates!
