I agree. would love too. but living in a 700 sq ft house in the city.. wife and i bedroom in the basement ( where the room is) with daughter living upstairs in only bedroom of house, surrounded by parking lot and rental 4 plexes.. probably shouldnt be doing it at all but have utmost of security measures. have very small yard in front, no yard in back... small pepper and tomato garden in front ( 10 gallon gets tilled into that yearly) . I hate living here, its just the circumstance... please dont tell me it can be done... I would love to but for security and space reasons it cant.. there are most out there that can compost and recycle, even when they say they cant.. there there are a few of us that absolutely cant no matter how you cut it.
Someday I will be in the country but till then... you gotta do what you gotta do
Then you don't have the space to grow. If you are visiting this forum (organic soil) you must have some inkling that soil is alive....really. If you are quitting growing then fine. If you are growing again then dumping your soil is not only criminal, it is stupid. I used the same soil in the same containers for years without dumping it out once.
If your circumstances are so awful, then maybe you should try hydroponics.
For those of you dumping in the country, consider whether you are spreading unwanted pathogens, mycorrhizal spores, etc. to farmers and wild flora.
also why are you guys so paranoid? its just dirt the shits everywhere and get this... they sell it in like every single goddamn store on the planet. i dont know how you having dirt in your house is against any law, and if a cop is in your house and he finds dirt i really think you got bigger issues like why theres a cop in your house snooping around.
tell us some parts per old soil to new soil?
what do you add to keep it goin?
even if they found 10lbs of nugs in there, they wouldn't know where it came from.
avoiding perlite is the first step towards more permanent soil.
please dont tell me it can be done... I would love to but for security and space reasons it cant..
I don't understand the knock on perlite. It does break over time, but if you have the large chunky stuff this breakage is going to provide a diversity of particle sizes. Additionally, in no-till applications the perlite is unlikely to break up over time.
I understand you can use other stuff (pumice, DE, clay, rice hulls, ect) in place of perlite, but perlite is just easy, cheap, available, and seems to do a good job overall.
Pine
I would not say [perlite] does a good job overall compared to other choices.
remix with amendments... no real info on how much this or that. kinda the experiment route
ok, im still not getting it. sure it looks fishy when you're moving tons of dirt in and out of houses, but dont you think thats stupid in the first place that you would be doing a large commercial grow indoors and you didnt plan out a better method of growing than buying big pallets of dirt and bringing them into your house every 4 months.
but for everyone else growing on a small scale, theres nothing wrong with having dirt or perlite? wtf is wrong with perlite? why would perlite in my garden raise suspicions? OMFG ITS PERLITE CALL TEH COPS. even if you dont have a single plant on your whole premise visible, buying a couple of cubic feet of dirt and perlite is hardly suspicious. some of you are making sense, well not really cuz if im gonna be growing enough weed where i need to worry about dumping 5 cubic feet of dirt i would have figured out a way to recycle it cuz trying to dump that much dirt is like the most retarded and suspicious thing ever. like moving my rolled up carpet with a big body sized lump in the middle of the day on public transportation.
i understand why you can't just dump tons of soil, what i cant understand is why. even if you dont ammend the soil and you only use chemical ferts, you can still reuse it unless you're one of those people who uses ferts up until the last day and even still you can reuse it, just root your seedling or clones in something else and then transplant into the old soil and fert as neccessary.
one more thing. mad librettist, whats wrong with perlite again? last i checked it was just puffed glass like rice crispies. how is that in any way harmful in soil? or anywhere for that matter.