GROW VEGETABLES IN COMPOST AND SAND

In today's episode we will look at how to grow plants in a sand and compost based potting medium now it's a cheap potting medium but does it really work? well let's find out now I've chosen different kinds of plants for this test so the first plant that we will beand act looking at is radish so radish being a root vegetable is an interesting test so let's see how it performs in this potting medium so to prepare this container mix we will be using play sand and perlite and compost and you can see the proportions on your screen right now and this is what we will be using for all our tests so after the kids are done playing with the play sand at home there's a lot of leftover sand so we decided to use that play sand and put it to good use so what kind of sand would you use for this potting mix now you could use any kind of sand the only sand that you wanna stay away from is sands that are found next to saltwater sources like Oceans or sea the sand that's found around them on beaches are not good because they contain a lot of salts now i added the perlite for better drainage however you can skip the perlite if you want to so as you can see here the radish plant is growing really well it has very nice leaves, a strong stem and hopefully there are radishes growing below the soil too. So it's now time for us to harvest our radish and see how it looks like now it was a little difficult for me to pull this radish out of the container which was quite surprising and let's look at how our raddish looks like that's our first one and I think it's pretty well sized and its a good-looking radish and let's go ahead and harvest the other one as well and as you can see this is also a nice big radish that we could harvest now overall I was very happy with the quality of radishes that I got now as you can see here the soil is a little dry and this is one of the downsides I would say to growing in sand is that the soil dries out pretty quickly and that's why you need to make sure that the soil is moist all around you can see the worms love this container mix too so this combination of sand and compost as well as the added perlite really makes a good potting medium so what's our conclusion for radish I think be the radish grows really well in this container mix and as you can see the radish looks great and it also tasted very nice so root vegetables like radish are a good candidate to grow in a sand and compost base potting medium no plant test is complete without a tomato plant so what I've done is I've used the same container that I had planted the radish and I planted this tomato plant this is the Juliet hybrid variety of tomato which is one of my favorites and as you can see here I've added a little bit of mulch on the top and this much really helps retain a lot of moisture in the soil so this tomato plant started with some really good growth nice leaves strong stems and it continued to grow throughout the growing season in a very nice way and it also started producing fruit at the right time so the fruits this plant produced were of great quality as you can see here and they also tasted very nice so overall this plant grew really well in this container mix now I noticed that the soil was drying out a lot on hotter days So I added a drip irrigation system and that really helped retain a lot of moisture as well so let's go ahead and harvest some tomatoes from this plant and as you can see these tomatoes are not only good looking they also tasted really good so overall this plant was producing some high quality fruits throughout the growing season and hence I can conclude that this potting max this sand and compost based potting mix worked really well for this tomato plant as well you can see all these vine ripened tomatoes really good and really delicious all being harvested from this tomato plant and as I mentioned I was able to harvest a lot these tomatoes right throughout the growing season and the plants are still growing it's been three months now and the plants continue to flourish Now the next plant that will be testing in this potting mix is Cilantro which is a herb now the cilantro seedlings were able to emerge very easily and it was a tough job keeping the seedlings moist as you can see the potting mix got very dry on hotter days and it was tough to keep up with the watering all the time so yes with this sand based potting mix you will need to water your plants a little bit more than usual but as long as the seedlings were watered well they had no problems keeping up with the growth and they showed a lot of vigor when they were growing now once the seedlings emerge one of the tasks that we need to do is thin the seedlings now what I realized was that in a sand based potting mix it was a lot easier to thin the seedlings because they were easy to pull out and once the soil was moist I was easily able to pull out the seedlings and thin them now for cilantro I usually keep two or at the most three seedlings per location however I prefer to keep just one as much as I can if I have to keep 2 I'll keep 2 but I stick to one for most of the plants including cilantro now some of you might remember my earlier video on growing cilantro and in that video a lot of you had asked me how I grew cilantro so easily now the results are in front of you it's a simple sand based potting mix cilantro has grown really well the leaves are really nice and I was able to harvest these leaves several times and they keep coming back and just look at the quality of the cilantro leaves they are really good and fresh cilantro is one of the most amazing things you can grow in your garden and as you can see you do not even need a lot of space to grow cilantro so there we have it this was our experiment of growing plants in a sand and compost based potting medium and I would say that was quite a success all the plants did really well the radish the tomato as well as the cilantro so I'd like to know from you if you have tried growing in this sand based potting medium I would love to know your experiences and I'll see you again soon