by Gary Selvaggio

Created on: April 21, 2008   Last Updated: September 07, 2011

Best bedding soil I ever came across was the worst stuff I could imagine: crushed sandstone with decomposed pepper tree mulch. My neighbor with the day-glow floribunda grossifolia roses, Chris, laughed and warned me that nothing was going to grow in that material except pocket gophers. I was a bit annoyed at Chris's smug confidence and was prepared to gather up snails that night and toss them over the fence into his rose garden but took up what I considered a dare instead. Pepper tree droppings are supposed to be notorious for starving plants and the sandstone shouldn't have a lick of nutrients worth the bother of a hungry weed. The material had been the remains of the cut and fill grading for my new guest house and it was spread out to form a 15 foot by 60 foot berm on the east side of the guest house.

As I placed each of the fifteen 1 gallon tea roses, the dozen 1 pint Spanish lavenders and the dozen 1 pint purple osteospermums I soaked each in situ, with B1 rooting liquid. I then laid on a two inch mulch of cedar bark mini nuggets and set up a drip system for the roses and covered the remaining plants with mini-sprinklers. That was all done last spring. This April every single plant took well and is thriving better than I could imagine. Each osteospermum is two feet tall and six feet wide and throwing up flower heads like crazy. The roses won't stop blooming and my wife is now sick of having them stuck in vases and jelly jars all over the house. One of the bushy, two foot lavenders fell victim to a falling tree limb and when I dug it up I found the roots had grown down about a foot into the soil mixture, indicating a perfect medium for rooting.

Now I sat down and did some quick calculations. Figuring the cost saved by not removing the cut and fill material, added to the savings from not hauling in some good topsoil plus amendments and all the other fa-noodling, and the loss of about 10% of the plants as the natural course of my kind of gardening, I must have saved about $900. Right then and there I jumped up, told the wife I'd just made a bundle and went out and bought myself a Black & Decker gas powered weed whacker with all the attachments, including a 3 inch rotary tiller.  Anyway, the lesson appears to be that you can turn a nurseryman's nightmare into some pretty good, inexpensive growing medium a long as you like a challenge and share a fence with a smug neighbor like mine.

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