Planting beds in Soil Bags

I swear by my Mel's Mix, but would be willing to try it with the premixed bags of MM.

My sister did it with the tomato and pepper plants I gave her last year.  Don't know how much she harvested, but I know she got some tomatoes and peppers.  Think she used a miracle grow product.

Kay

Better of course for plants like lettuce with shallow root systems. Plants like tomatoes tend to form a main root ball that can be a foot square or more, and so a soil bag of the type you'd buy compost in -- I think that's what you're talking about here -- might not be deep enough for ideal root development. Even Mel's Mix is recommended to be six inches high.

Also, Mel's Mix is an especially well-structured and nutritious soil with good water retention and aeration capabilities. My experience with store-bought compost has been disappointing. It's been very wood-heavy, with sometimes largish wood pieces, and plenty of peat. If you tried this out of the sort of compost bags I've bought, I would expect to have to supplement heavily with lots of nitrogen for sure, and who knows what else. And isn't one of the points of this experiment that it sounds so low-maintenance and ready-to-go?

Some people succeed doing it, I know. A friend of mine who normally does well gardening in raised beds says his "slash open a bag and plant" results have been disappointing. But one anecdote is not necessarily any better than the next. Be wary about the compost quality. When you write "soil," I especially wonder if you might just be getting some "topsoil," some of which is pretty miserable no matter what it says on the bag or how natural it is to assume that topsoil is the good stuff.

The fertilizer in the Miracle-gro soil bags will typically be used up in about 8 weeks.

Here's the post going around Facebook.  It looks pretty good and apparently works just fine for shallow root plants.


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This worked well for me for many years - it's a simple, weed-free way to grow lettuce, spinach and even radishes. Take a 2 cubic feet bag of potting soil (I used Miracle Grow), rumple it around quite a bit to loose the soil, poke quite a few holes in the back side for drainage, then lay the bag on a smooth surface that will allow drainage and not get too hot, and cut out the top, leaving about a 4 or 5 inch border all around. Lightly rake through the soil to even it out and loosen it even more, then carefully, and evenly sprinkle the seeds around. I put my salad green seeds in an old spice bottle with large shaker holes, added some cornmeal, shook it all up to mix well and sprinkled them out of it. I put the cornmeal in there to allow me to see that I had covered the soil evenly. If doing radish seeds or spinach, just make lines the depth mentioned on the seed pack, plant the seeds and cover appropriately. For salad greens I sprinkled a lite covering of soil over the cornmeal and seeds and then spray-misted to water them in. I put my bags on metal sawhorses and grates to make them waist level. This kept the bags off the hot concrete and I didn't have to bend over when cutting my salad. When harvesting, just use a pair of scissors and cut what you need - don't pull the plants out. Same goes for spinach - they will grow back almost magically overnight, and you can't tell where you cut. Spray mist the seeds and plantlings at first when watering, until they are established, then you can water more vigorously as the plants mature. You will probably need to water more often, since the depth of the bags are not as deep as a regular in-ground garden. I just kept mine moist, but not sopping wet.

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I also read that tomatoes can put out roots 4' deep and have a radius of 4'.  Probably won't work in these bags.

Rahab222 wrote:I also read that tomatoes can put out roots 4' deep and have a radius of 4'.  Probably won't work in these bags.

Put the bags on the ground and the roots will go through the bags into the ground.  I think that's what my sister did.   But tomatoes will also grow very well in 6" of MM in a table top.

Kay