Potting Soil Time
A Lesson in Full Stack Gardening
Until someone decides to pay me lavishly to write words rather than code, the modern software biz pays my bills. And in that world, members of a peculiar subspecies like to call themselves “full stack developers”. Look it up, it’s a thing. It sounds so complete, as if they know everything about everything. You know… Salsa recipes. Advice to the lovelorn. How to fix that weird rumble in your clothes dryer. Insight into the substructure of reality. Give them space station schematics, and they’ll write the control system software. Send your requirements, and they’ll create a sexy new web “UX” (trendy software developers would never say “screen design”). That kind of thing. Whatever you want. They’ll write anything. That’s the “full stack” message. Well la de freakin’ da…
It goes without saying (though I’ll say it anyway) that most of the self-indulgent claims from these superstar unicorn types are gross exaggerations — but, then again, so is 99% of the stuff on LinkedIn. The prototype full stack developer is a guy or gal in his or her mid to late thirties, dripping with mid career hubris. This person exudes confident, insider gravitas on every subject from politics to potpourri, and is incapable of constructing a sentence without injecting streams of jargon birthed in the past five years by tech influencers. Genuflecting is optional, but it seems expected at times.
Yes, I’m feeling a little like Tim Whatley at this point, but I can’t unsee some of the things I’ve seen, as the software business turns toward something that resembles a cult or The Stepford Wives, or both.
So, yeah, the full stack schtick gets old quickly. And now you know why I prefer gardening. At least it’s real.
In any case, you are free to view the term “full stack” as either legit descriptor (if you happen to be a full stack developer) or resume-padding hooey (if you’re anyone else) — I care not. But, either way, I think the idea is wasted on software developers. Really, who cares if you can write server code and design clunky user interfaces and inefficient databases in a pinch? Big deal. I learned how to do that in 1993, after a particularly long day copying floppies to a mammoth 30 megabyte hard drive.
Real men (and women) grow tomatoes and nice zinnias.
So, yeah, I think gardeners deserve self-indulgent titles just as much as mid-career tech demigods do, if not more. In that spirit, I shamelessly offer the label to my soil-weary avocational brethren, who prefer processing tomatoes to CPU cycles. This full stack developer’s heart is with the tomatoes. So may I introduce to you… the act you’ve known for all these years… (no, not Billy Shears…), for the first time in the garden literature…
The “Full Stack Gardener”™
(cue enthusiastic canned applause)
So what is a full stack gardener? Here’s my definition:
A full stack gardener is someone who sees gardening as a year-round activity. The full stack gardener grows miniature ecosystems, not plants. S/he stands at the bow of the ship, always looking ahead, preparing for what will inevitably come. The full stack gardener sees a problem not for what it seems to be, but for how it came to be. The solution is not a point, but a multi-dimensional surface extending from past to future. The garden is not an end but a never-ending process.
So there! Take that you haughty software types. Gardeners can bring the woo too.
As it happens, a few days ago I took a brief break from my hopelessly boring full stack software activities to instead focus on an essential full stack gardening activity. Yes, folks, it’s time to make the potting soil for 2025!
I’ve been making my own potting soil and seed starting media for decades. I can’t even remember the last time I bought a bag of soil. I make my own soil out of a few simple ingredients and store it in the garage in five-gallon buckets. Four buckets will usually see me through seed-starting season. It is a glorious, pH-balanced, nutrient-dense mix with almost perfect structure and water retention properties. I never fertilize or otherwise feed seedlings, primarily because my home-spun soil mix makes it unnecessary.
I often marvel (and mourn) at how Big Gardening can transform the simplest issues into needlessly complex puzzles that vex even some experienced gardeners. Potting soil isn’t complicated, or at least it shouldn’t be. The best potting soil and seed-starting media are the same thing — a mixture of mostly screened, finished compost, some fine to medium grain perlite, and a little sand. That’s all you need. I buy the perlite in bulk; a bag lasts at least three or four seasons. I use standard play sand, and still haven’t used the entire bag that I bought for three bucks almost two decades ago.
Of course, the star of the show — and the stuff that is most difficult to source for some people — is good quality compost. Fortunately for me, I make my own compost out of fall leaves, shredded yard waste and kitchen scraps. When a pile is done, I reserve the best material — always the stuff at the bottom — for potting soil. I generally fill a wheel barrow with that material, and then process it through a grate into a trash can, to remove all the sticks and other debris.
After the lid is secured to the can, the material will sit undisturbed for at least a year, sometimes two years, where it will slowly lose all residual clumpiness and emerge as a very uniform humus after six to eighteen months. Yes, full stack gardeners need to look well ahead. The compost I am making now will supply my potting soil inventory in 2026!
So here’s a can of screened compost from late 2022, where we join my current story in progress. This can was almost full when it started. As you can see, the composting process continues even with “finished” material (remember, this stuff started out as the creme de la creme from a “finished” pile). The volume of material has shrunk by almost half. But what’s left is pure soil gold.
So the first step is to transfer the contents of the can to a wheel barrow. This stuff is dense and surprisingly heavy, so I generally choose to dig it out with a shovel rather than trying to lift the trash can. From there I add maybe a couple quarts of perlite and maybe a pint or so of sand. After mixing thoroughly, the result looks like this:
At this point you have probably the best all-around soil mix that money can’t buy. Almost anything will thrive in this stuff. Oh, sure, specialty plants like African violets and cacti require special blends. But virtually all garden seeds and seedlings will do well in this mix, without additives or fertilizers of any kind.
There is only one problem — which typically isn’t much of a problem, but this batch was weird. In a word: worms. Now, I have nothing against worms in general. They are partly responsible for the quality of this soil, after all. God bless the worms. Typically, they do their dirty, slimy deeds very efficiently, and, by the time I get around to making potting soil, have all but disappeared. The mini ecosystem that created the coveted material in the can has usually calmed down by this stage, with all visible mega fauna (spiders, worms, centipedes, roly polies, etc.) out of the picture. In a normal year, I would simply fill the buckets with the new soil, leave them out in the sun for a few days to kill whatever might be left, and then store the buckets in the garage for the winter.
But not this year. This stuff still had plenty of worms. Small worms, but hundreds of them. Their animated movements and related behavior suggest that these are likely the dreaded invasive jumping worms, or maybe some hybridized form of them. They’re too small to identify clearly, as I am no vermeologist (I had to look that one up). But it’s really not the point anyway — I don’t know about you, but I’m not a fan of wormy seed-starting mix, whether of the jumpy athletic or lazy couch potato variety. But jumping doesn’t help, certainly.
With juvenile worms jumping everywhere like a pre-school sleepover, and the inventory of hot and sunny days seemingly endless this summer, I decided to try a more intense solarization strategy. I unfolded a plastic drop cloth on the driveway and spread the soil mix on the drop cloth, like so:
For extra credit, I probably should have put a second drop cloth on top, but I didn’t have one handy. So I used a push broom to spread the stuff around a couple times a day. After two days, most of the worms appeared to be gone. I’m hoping that continuing to solarize in the plastic buckets for a few more days will take care of the stragglers, including any cocoons. I suppose we will find out in February, when pepper-starting season arrives.
I have one other concern, which is an excuse to pontificate on one of my well-trodden personal Jeopardy categories…
“Ken, I’ll take Unintended Side Effects for a thousand.”
<ding> “Chaos”
<buzzes in> “What adding chemical fertilizers to soil produces?“
“CORRECT!”
Sorry, I digress. What I meant to say is I’ve never solarized potting soil like this before, exposed as it was to the air and full sun for two days. At a minimum, the soil has dried out quite a bit. Rehydration should be relatively simple when the time comes, and the dryness should help tamp down any crazy ideas that residual creepy crawlies might get over the winter. That’s all fine. But I do wonder what else this airing out might have, well… aired out. Am I somehow losing important soil biochemistry in the process? It is silly to think that nothing else is changing in this soil as it interacts with the wind and UV? Am I really to believe that I’ve changed nothing but what I set out to change?
No, I don’t believe that for a second. I know better. I preach this principle to gardeners nearly every day — you cannot possibly understand the equilibria that you destroy when you intervene. The natural world can’t read your mind. It doesn’t know that you just want to kill some worms. If you hit the headpin with a bowling ball, you don’t merely knock down the headpin. And I know that I didn’t merely kill some worms over the past couple days. Some invisible pins surely fell.
So we’ll see what happens …in February. This is the essence of full stack gardening. We observe the now. We enjoy it. We make notes. But the broader garden that we ponder is a living system, one that emerges in both space and time, folding into itself in ways that we can’t understand or imagine.