Gardeners - Used MiracleGro Garden Soil for entire garden bed. Bad idea?

fuzzybabybunny

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Jan 2, 2006
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I bought MiracleGro Vegetables and Herbs Garden Soil and put it all into my empty bed that's 8ft x 4ft x 11 inches deep.

I figured that since it's called "Garden Soil" it should be used entirely in the, you know, garden.

I looked at the instructions in the back and it said that 3-4 inches of it should be placed on top of native soil or top soil and mixed with.

Well, I don't have any native soil and I didn't buy any top soil.

The garden soil looks pretty airy with a lot of fibrous material. It smells of manure.

MiracleGro chat CSR said that I have to mix it with regular soil because otherwise it'll be too dense and suffocate the roots. That's not true - there are tons of fibers and there should be no suffocation issues. In fact, when looking at topsoil at the store, which is basically fine sand and clay, I would think that topsoil would suffocate plants, not the MiracleGro garden soil.

My concern is that it might over-fertilize the plants? What do you think? Should I just plant directly into it anyway?
 

MagnusTheBrewer

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Jun 19, 2004
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There are many plants and vegetables that don't do well in straight Miracle Grow. It says so right on the bag.
 

Mike64

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Apr 22, 2011
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There are many plants and vegetables that don't do well in straight Miracle Grow. It says so right on the bag.
Fwiw, there are different sorts of "Miracle Grow" (or is it "Gro"?). The "potting media" are not at all suited to outdoor beds or even very large containers/raised beds, except maybe to loosen up existing soil a bit, but Scott's also sells what they call "garden soil" which is intended for large-scale use in (outdoor) gardens. No bagged soil is as good as proper "loam", but I think Miracle Grow's is probably no worse than any other brand's (and very possibly freer of weed seeds and crap like that than some totally generic store-bought soils), especially if amended with a good helping of composted manure, and the odd handful of lime to balance the pH, as needed. It's good as a starting point, anyway, especially if no one will be doing much maintenance on it any time soon. The only really good way to maintain soil over time is basically some form of composting (either separately prepared, or by turning in some sort of groundcover at the end of the growing season) but assuming the parents are on the elderly side, so unable or not interested in doing anything remotely strenuous in the yard, and the OP won't be around to do it, that doesn't sound like an option for the foreseeable future.
 
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BonzaiDuck

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Jun 30, 2004
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The OP's proposition wouldn't be my strategy.

I live in the so-called "Inland Empire" -- Riverside -- in So-Cal. This place as this hardpan soil filled with granite sand. While this town had been a hub of citrus agriculture for much of its history, I've always thought the dirt sucked. And if I can buy a 25 lb bag of Navels or Valencias for $10, I'd rather grow tomatoes, eggplant, okra and onions.

My soil amendment and long-term modification involved purchase of several 3 cu ft bags of Kelloggs Garden Soil to mix with the hardpan initially, and building the entire garden into an array of raised beds. We go through a 25 lb bag of oranges every five days or so, and I compost the peels in a series of converted vinyl trash cans of the 32 gallon size. I've learned to attenuate the fly and maggot problem, and the composting is a two-phase process. The peels first must rot into a mush that looks like pumpkin pie filling. At that point, the citrus compounds that deter the worms are gone, and I have the biggest army of American Red Worms anywhere in the county. The mush gets transferred to another bin, mixed with some chicken manure or steer-manure-soil-mix, sand is added, and the worms allowed to turn it into worm castings (worm shit) and wiggling red spaghetti recruits for the army. When I plant a new tomato seedling, I don't worry about the rule-of-thumb to avoid planting where last year's tomato was rooted. I dig an 18"-deep hole, and fill it with my compost before adding the seedling -- planted deep for a better root system.

That's the way I do it. Then -- every summer, I get out my pressure canner and can about 10 quarts of Don Bonzi-Ducci's Special Pasta Sauce. And I make the eggplant Parmigiana. If I had a freakin' cow, I'd make my own Mozzarella. But we don't have a place for a cow, and the 5 or 6 lb block of Mozzarella at COSTCO comes at a great price.