Saturday was gorgeous, and I took advantage of the weather to mix up some potting mix and plant some seeds. The cats, meanwhile, rolled around in the dirt and chomped on the baby chard.
I love mixing up potting mix, and I take various approaches. Sometimes, I take previously used potting mix and add amendments. I did that on Saturday with potting soil from empty containers and some worm castings. In those, I planted some catnip, cat grass, sage, and lavender seeds. The catnip and lavendar are in small pots that are now living on my kitchen windowsill. The catnip and cat grass are for my garden supervisors (to distract them from the other plants), and the lavender will move outdoors if it survives. The catnip, cat grass, and sage seeds were leftover from previous years.
I also have started mixing coconut coir with compost and perlite to make my potting mix. The coir comes in compressed bricks that expand with water. A lot of folks use peat, which is included in a many commercial potting mixes. I definitely use those, but my understanding is that peat isn’t that sustainable, so I try to go with the coconut coir when i can. It also means I don’t have to fiddle with the pH.
I used the coconut coir and compost potting mix to move re-pot my mint into a bigger container and to plant several basil seedlings into a large pot.
It rained all day today, so I only had a few minutes in the garden. However, that was long enough to see that one of my painted lady runner beans had germinated!
I still have some annual salvia and rosemary seeds that I’d like to plant. The rosemary is another from my collection of leftovers.
On Plants and Paws 
Somehow I hadn’t realized (prolly just cuz I never thought about it, tbh) that backyard gardening was such an intricate specialization. My brain keeps translating the unfamiliar vocabulary into familiar terms with…unusual results. (“You planted snakes? What’s a coconut coil?? Wait a minute, I just have the regular kind – wtf is ANNUAL saliva??!”)
Anyhoo. Thanks for expanding my worldview. Wishing you a happy Monday and MOAR POTTING SOIL NAOW!
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Backyard gardening is as intricate as you want it to be. You can just grab some potting soil, throw it in pots, and throw some seeds in and call it a day. But I’m me, so I have to make things complicated.
Coconut coir is basically the brown stuff from coconuts that would be thrown away. It’s processed and turned into stuff that looks like soil (but doesn’t actually provide any food for the plants, which is why you have to mix in other stuff).
_Salvia_ is a huge genus of plants that includes the sage that we cook with, plus a whole bunch of flowering plants with varying lifespans, and maybe a hallucinogen or two. I stick with the culinary and flowering varieties.
Snake plants are a type of houseplant that survives my neglect and is of little interest to Leo. They’re in the genus _Sansevieria_ and are also called Mother-in-Law’s tongue.
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Ok, thanks! (Please know that I am holding out hope you plant hallucinogenic snakes. Cuz I think Leo’d like ’em.)
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