It’s hard to believe we’re at this point all ready! It seems like just weeks ago, we were planting our gardens! Alas, it’s time for us to tear down our container gardens for the winter. So, this gives us another opportunity to talk about our soil storage techniques!
Some might ask if it’s even possible to re-use the soil that you use when growing in containers, absolutely it is! We’ve been re-using our container garden soil now for nine seasons at this point! As far as we can tell, there isn’t a “limit” on how many times you can re-use it, especially if you take decent care of it. One of the very obvious problems that comes with container gardening at any kind of large scale is how to deal with the volumes of soil that we’re working with.
We like to use what are called Geobin composting bins for our soil storage. While you can certainly use any kind of containers to store soil, we like this method as it heavily promotes the breakdown of the roots in our soil. Composting does best at relatively large volumes, meaning almost all of the plant’s roots are composted over the winter months. Despite getting as cold as it does here, we do see fairly decent levels of root composting over the winter months. When we go to re-use the soil the next spring, it’s practically a big pile of soil that we can simply scoop from.
The Geobins are capable of storing a little over 200 gallons of soil each, so it works exceptionally well for large container gardens like we have. In fact, we expanded our soil storage to three bins (over 700 gallons!) this year as we were really pushing our storage with just two in recent years. Frankly, there’s few solutions out there that are both inexpensive and scale as high as the Geobins, we absolutely love them. We also use our Geobins for “actual” composting as well.
Certainly, setting up for winter storage is fairly easy. We just trim out our plants, dump the soil from our containers into the bins and let it all sit for the winter. In the spring, we’ll often amend our soils with additional compost, sometimes granular fertilizers or other additives like more perlite, vermiculite or peat moss if they’re needed. While it’s not the easiest gardening thing to do, we’ve been quite pleased with the overall flow of it. Especially after battling many other, more difficult methods.
There’s really nothing “special” about the Geobins, just that they’re relatively inexpensive and hold lots of soil or compost. You can get the same kind of “composting effect” with any large bin. Even a large pile of used soil right on the ground will certainly compost some over the winter, providing essentially the same net benefit. We just have gravitated towards this method as we had a pretty “big” problem once we scaled our container gardens to the level that they are today.
So, if you’re looking for how to handle soil storage, this is our method. We do like it fairly well and our Geobins have held up incredibly well to the harsh subarctic winters we experience. We have some that are approaching regular use over an entire decade, so it’s definitely something that fits our “buy once, cry once” mentality.
