Succulent soil

Do an internet search on succulent soil and usually you will get back something like, it MUST be 50% perlite or pumice. In my investigation of replacing the soil in two of my four greenhouse beds with a succulent mix, what that would mean is taking out half the garden soil and mixing in about 19 cubic feet of pumice or perlite. Perlite floats and breaks down over time, so I don't want entire garden beds with that. If I lived near an Oregon volcano, the pumice would cost $25. If I order a cubic yard from BuildASoil, it would be $640, and shipping is 2/3rds of the cost. A cubic yard is more than I need, unless I did three beds instead of two, all except the strawberry bed. BuildASoil has a local distributor in Billings, but I don't expect they have these giant 900-lb. bags of pumice just sitting around. OK, so use something like pea gravel, coarse sand, chicken grit (crushed granite), or even floaty perlite. Still costly.

Then I read this in "Hardy Succulents: Tough Plants for Every Climate" by Gwen Moore Kelaidis, one of the only books I have found that concentrates on the named subject. She states, "Sempervivums thrive in heavy, clay-based soils...." I admit that is a sentence fragment and she provides more context after that, but the fact that she started with that gave me pause on my idea of buying a giant bag of pumice. Why should all succulents require the same type of soil no matter where they are planted? "Succulent" is a descriptive term, not a biological classification. Sempervivums are from the mountains of Europe. Echeverias are from the high deserts of Latin America. Haworthias are from arid mountains in southern Africa. Sedums cover the world in a variety of habitats. What they all have in common is they need well-draining soils, and most of them do not have pumice in their native range. Also, some are planted in terra cotta pots, some in ceramic pots, some in plastic pots, some in large wooden planters, and some in the ground. I have noticed that my terra cotta pots dry out faster than ceramic pots.

I usually discover these tangents when I am reading at midnight, and this was no exception. I have been buying Black Gold Organic Cacti and Succulent mix at Ace Hardware for about $9 per 8-quart bag, which is about 1/4th of a cubic foot. To fill my planter beds with this mix would cost $700. (Hmmm, cheaper than pumice.) I recently acquired some alternatives but haven't made any comparisons yet. I will be using them in the next month. My preliminary conclusion from my midnight reading was a raised bed mix might not have to be as gritty as a potting mix. Maybe I don't have to replace 50% of my garden soil with pumice. It's could be a smaller number, maybe 1/3rd, maybe 1/4th. And there are alternatives to pumice that might be cheaper locally. The goal is to have well-draining soil, and there are different ways to get there.

As often happens with the internet, there is a lot of contradictory information out there. I will sort through it and come up with something that will be a reasonable cost for my area and won't kill my sempervivums, sedums and delospermas. As usual, the purpose of this blog is not to inform anyone besides myself, and writing it down like this helps me make a decision.

Junior went to the greenhouse yesterday to join all of the other Sempervivums. Eventually he should end up in one of those planters.