Containing my garden - reboot every year?

[Tilde]

So for various reasons I'm container planting instead of raised bed gardening at the moment. Part of it is time and ability to get around in the garden.

Re-started this year with 'organic potting soil' (Jungle Growth?), got the worms just about going again, and leaf mould ... moulding on the front porch.

But reading through this site, both the container and non-container bits - am I just going to have to reboot every year and keep buying "potting soil"?

My thought was, run the plants through a cycle with new soil, amending as we get nearer to the end of the year and the 'built in' fertz start running out.

As the plants die off, chop up the dead vegetation, layer it on the soil, add some worm castings and/or other ferts, and put in new plants.

Not a lot of crop rotation you can do with the limited things I'm growing, but still ...

[rainbowgardener]

I'm not sure about the just laying dead vegetation on the soil. Partly it probably just offends my sense of tidiness, it will look messy and then kind of nasty for a long time while it breaks down. It will break down a lot faster if buried in the soil. But depending on what kind of vegetation, anything carbon heavy (like woody stuff, tree leaves) will rob nitrogen from the soil if buried. And if you are continually burying stuff you will be disturbing the roots of the stuff in the container all the time. Part of why I compost (compost bin or worm bin).

What I do about the soil is once a year dump all the soil out of containers into a wheelbarrow. Add about the same amount of fresh potting soil, mix together and repot, using the opportunity to divide whatever needs to be divided, cut stuff back, etc. But I don't grow tomatoes in containers. If I did, I would just put that soil in the compost pile. Tomatoes are very susceptible to diseases, which can be passed on through the soil.

[Tilde]

Tomatoes is what got this thread going in my head - I'm growing them, peppers, and shortly potatoes from the nightshade family

But if I'm only dumping 4 or 5 7.5 gal containers a year, that's not much.

If the tomatoes are the most susceptible to disease - can I simply rotate them around? 4 containers for tomatoes this season, then turn them into beans the next season, and cukes and squash after that, then a season of carrots before going back to tomatoes again?

[rainbowgardener]

Yes, the crop rotation would help a lot, but you can't put any of the nightshades in the same soil - tomatoes, potatoes, peppers.

[Tilde]

Never ever ever*? Right now I've got four tomatoes, four or five peppers, and a plan for a couple sacks of potatoes. The other 2/3 of my plan are herbs and curbits and salad.

Eventually I'll need "new" dirt for the citrus trees, but that's at least a year down the road, so I could probably get three seasons out of the current new nightshade dirt (this season being the first) before I repot the (hopefully survived) citrus next fall in a mixture of nightshaded dirt and cactus/citrus mix ...

While I am starting with bagged soil and all it's no so eco friendly goodness (peat, carbon xportation) I was hoping to be able to ramp up compost and such 'production' to amend it indefinetly with some minor local-sourced amendments (coconut coir) ....

*not as in the organic police will get me but as in wasting of time and resources to watch the plants croaaaak