Reusing soil

Used to, won't be doing it anymore.

I started growing a little over a year ago. Made lots of mistakes of course, one of them being starting with MG soil and nutes. As you might expect, I had plants that one could not call lush by the time I was into bud. Yellowing, burning, curling..not pretty.

I reused soil, mixing in fresh (not MG). Plants looked a little better, but still got lots of yellow early in bud. And, it just got worse as time went on. I think I have some soil that got used 3 times.

After a little over a year of growing and learning, I have no doubt that reusing soil is not a good idea. By the time you finish a grow, start a new one and start adding nutes etc, you really don't know what the hell is in there. Makes problem solving more difficult at the very least.

I started some pots a couple months ago using new quality soil, and have a few of those halfway into bud now. Huge difference! No yellow anywhere yet..nice, lush healthy looking plants. It is my opinion that using fresh soil every time is well worth the money. Shouldn't be hard to find someone with a garden if you don't have one of your own to put old soil in, which it should be perfectly good for.

Just my $.02.

have u tried bio-bizz soil?

Nope, but I am trying both FFOF and one called Just Right. Both seem good, but really I think the biggest improvement is using fresh soil period. Even with cheap soil you can amend as needed.

Yes its true, But i do Transplanting, The minerals naturally available in the soil will get exhausted,
so its better growth and yield, when we do transplanting,
The soil gets Too mush tightly packed, and it will not allow any nitrogen passage and aircirculation,
compact soil will choke a plant and reduce the growth, i do removed my plants and added some pearlite to the soil,,,
the plants came quite bushy and healthy...

If you grow organic and have a large yard I'm sure it's possible to re-use soil if you really need to but I wouldn't. Farmers re-use their actual soil crop after crop but there's a technique to it. You don't actually have to add fertilizers if you rotate crops. Put that soil out in your garden and grow 3 or 4 crops of something else ending in peanuts and then till the peanuts into the soil instead of harvesting. Peanuts draw nitrogen from the air and store it in their tubers, corn farmers sometimes would stagger rows of corn with rows of peanuts before chemical fertilizers were available. Keep in mind you can only take so much from the land, look at Australian fertilizer as opposed to the rest of the world. After crop after crop on the same land, the micro-nutrients and trace elements are missing in Australian soil so they actually have to have specifically mixed fertilizer for food crops that's not needed anywhere else in the world that I'm aware of.

Yeah, never reuse soil. Not only are the natural nutrients depleted, you get all the leftover garbage of the last grow.

You get the build up of salts from all the added nutes. You might have soil critters, bacteria waste and basically a used up medium.

Definitely start with fresh soil for each grow. Its not that expensive.

Best thing for used soil is in the planter outside or in the trash. I like to use it outside to in-rich the current stuff outside.

Reusing soil is fine, you just have to know how to do it. Flushing, then baking, then amending should be able to fix any issues you have. Still though I don't reuse my soil anymore, instead I also used it in my outside garden