soil garden vs potting soil

spysee

spysee

Hey guys I need some advice.
 
I bought 2 bags of Lambert's garden soil, and 2 bags of Lambert's potting soil. Would it be a bad idea to mix them together and use it all as potting soil? Or should I just buy more of their potting soil? The garden soil is 2-3 dollars cheaper per bag so I figured worse case scenario would be I plant a few in the ground based on everyone's advice.
 
Also if anyone has any other recommendations with this brand it would be appreciated.
 
Just to clarify, are you using for potting up plants or seed starting? Where you're at I assume potting up. I don't know the brand as we don't have it up here in frozen tundra. But, what I do is get potting mix, Pro-Mix BX when I can find it, add compost, alfalfa meal and composted chicken manure. I don't measure but it's about 4-1-1-1.
 
I wouldn't use garden soil in a container at all. It's too heavy, compacts and is poor draining. It would probably be too much trouble to mix it with something like peat moss to get a decent light texture. If it were me, I would stick with the potting soil only...Just my opinion though!
 
     I have found through (disappointing) experience that just about anything other than dedicated potting soil is just too heavy and impermeable for container use. Last year I used a mix of commercial compost, peat and perlite (about 2:3:1) in all my containers.
     We had a very wet Spring where I live, leading to saturated soil which nearly drowned my plants. Once things dried out in Summer, the soil hardened up. The small particle size of the commercial compost I used then led to severe compaction in the containers. Instead of being nice, fluffy, absorbent potting soil, the surface of the soil looked more like concrete and kind of shrank away from the sides of the container. This made it very hard to water, as all the water just ran off the surface of the concrete and down the gap between the soil and the container.
     This year, I'm just going to keep things simpler and use a good, light potting mix and (hopefully) have a much easier and more successful grow.
 
I'm with the others. I grow in containers and use Pro-Mix HP. It is super light, has lots of chunky perlite and vermiculite for drainage, and I can fill a lot of buckets per bag. I get mine from the local Mennonite farmers for half the price of gardening stores. Ask your local farmers if they sell potting soil.

Avoid gardening soil. It compacts too easily. Avoid any cheap soils. If your plants are less healthy and yield less fruit because you paid a few dollars less, you will regret it when it is too late. Start right, end right.
 
Thanks for the advice guys. I was worried about it becoming too compact, thought there might be a chance with mixing it though, and because lambert's is super fluffy/airy compared to every other brand I've bought. I'll just bite the bullet and buy 2-3 more bags of their potting soil. I'll use the garden soil to grow some tomatoes or maybe some bell peppers.
 
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