Now that we’ve shut down the entirety of our container gardens for the season, we can show you how we store our soil over the winter months! The logistics involved with storing large amounts of container garden soil is different from smaller container gardens.
We utilize several Geobin composters as our method of storage. These are intended to be large compost bins, of course, but storing container garden soil is an excellent alternative use. Each unit holds roughly 250 gallons of soil, even more if you pile them up pretty good.
What’s great about using composters for storage is that it naturally promotes composting of the plant’s roots. Just like in a compost pile, hungry organisms will move in and start to break down those organics. We generally find, even with our exceptionally cold winters, that we get very good root composting and our soil is “almost” root free the next spring.
Now, the biggest drawback to this method is that the soil becomes a block of ice over the winter. In our case, we don’t usually see the entire piles thaw until a week or two after our last frost. We’ve been able to make it work, though, by staggering our container planting over time. As you remove soil, it exposes it to warmer temps and the thaw happens semi-quickly.
This method works great for large container gardens. But, if you’re container gardens are smaller, using totes, troughs or other containers are certainly also valid storage techniques. We do find it best to “dump and refill” each season as it promotes the breakdown of roots and also sort of acts like crop rotation in a way.
Believe it or not, we’ve encountered people that didn’t inherently know you could re-use container garden soil. We’ve been doing it for over a decade now, with the same soil. We find the concerns around disease and other problems to be quite overblown. You wouldn’t think twice about re-using your garden’s soil, why should container garden soil be any different?
There’s not a ton of folks out there that operate very large container gardens like we do. So, we find it valuable to discuss the “entire ecosystem” as things like what you should do for winter can easily be an oversight for the new container gardener. This is how we’ve solved it and it works great for us!
And for the record, we totally get a kick out of the fact that we can put up pics of a literal pile of dirt and some of you will like it. 😁
