hello friends welcome to California
gardening 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
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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
Happy Gardening!
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