Daleys Fruit Tree Blog: pots

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Making Potting Mix at Home and in a Nursery.

Video: Making your own potting mix

Video Transcript
We're often asked about our potting mix
we make our premium potting mix here at
Daley's nursery
Keep in mind that we do make
different mixes for specific plants so
I'm just going to show you a general
potting mix that you can also make in
your garden to pot up your beautiful
fruit trees and any other plants that
you're growing in containers so firstly
we start with basic ingredients and we
buy ours in bulk of course so this is
Coir and you can buy it in blocks like
this it's dried out it's pressed
together and it's quite compact so what
you need to do when you get your block
of Coir is to wet it down so you can pop
this in a wheelbarrow put in about ten
litres of water twenty litres of water
and it expands so you can see how much
it expands here so this is one block
once it's expanded so we actually put a
little sprinkler over lots of blocks of
koi and we wet them all down together so
we're ready to mix our potting mix now
as soon as you move this block it's
going to break up so I've got one here
that we've just moved over and you can
see it just becomes like a powder so
this is one of the basic ingredients of
our potting mix now next to us here
we've got composted pine bark and this
is just medium pines of composted pine
bark and it's the other main fundamental
ingredient in our potting mix and we're
going to actually mix these together so
what we do here at the nursery is we mix
about one-third of Coir to two-thirds of
pine bark we use a tractor and a scoop
and we actually put them in a big old
cement mixer so they get fed into this
chute we mix it all up with fertiliser
so we add slow-release fertiliser gypsum
we add Nutrimin and then we feed it up
this chute into our potting machine once
it's all really well mixed and then the
potting machine feeds the Potters to pot
up the plants so I'll show you that next
so this fabulous machine is our potting
machine and this is where we pot up the
majority of our plants here at Daley's
nursery
so it's a two-person operation and we'll
show you how it works but basically when
you turn it on it feeds out the potting
mix and people pot up here it's a really
fast and efficient way of potting up
plants
so if you want to make your own potting
mix at home you're going to need a
wheelbarrow some basic ingredients some
coir some pine bark if you can get it or
you might want to just use a bag of
premium grade potting mix so that's
going to be similar and it's already
going to have the fertilizer if you're
using plain pine bark you're going to
need some slow-release fertiliser so
we've got a couple of cups of Osmocote
and Nutricote coat these are slow-release
and they're going to last about eight to
twelve months so mix it all up in your
wheelbarrow
sprinkling my slow-release fertiliser so
I've got about two cups
and then mix it all through.
so you can see that the
fertiliser is sort of nicely spread
through the mix you can see the Coir is
pretty much broken up and I've got a
really beautiful mix of ingredients so
this is excellent we're going to use
this to pot up some of our beautiful

fruit trees

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