An Ingredient in Most Bagged Soil Products Is Harming Your Garden Plants (The Fix & Cause)

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Welcome to the rusted garden homestead.

[00:00:02]Let's just jump into this video. What happens when you buy those garbage bags of top soil, garden soil, raised bed soil, all the different names they put on there, and it's filled with woody material just like that. What that wood does, and it doesn't belong in a bag of potting mix, top soil, or anything like that. Anytime you have those bits of shredded wood, it's going to take nitrogen from your plants. Now, these plants look okay because I've been hitting them with a water-soluble fertilizer like every 7 to 10 days.

[00:00:40]That's how you can sort of fix your soil if it's a problem. The issue here, and I'm going to show you a couple more examples. I've already changed over and fixed this bed. I'm going to show you what the spinach look like, and I'm going to show you another bed with some radishes and stuff in there. These are turnups. They've been in here since uh March 1st. Today is Mother's Day. These should be this tall. Nice big turnups.

[00:01:04]They should be growing. They're greening up now after really probably the fourth dose of water soluble fertilizer in bad soil. Peas can do okay because they fix their own nitrogen. Back here, those are mustard greens that have been sitting in there for 60 days.

[00:01:23]They should be 12 in tall, 18 in tall, fully ready to be harvest. When you have this woody material mixed in the top 2, 4, 6 in of your soil, top 5, 10, 15 cm, that wood is not going to support your plants.

[00:01:42]It's actually going to harm them. The microbes want to break the woody material down. The microbes need nitrogen. They take it from your plants.

[00:01:50]There's no way mustard greens should look like that in 60 days. The issue, bad soil, really bad bags of top soil, potting mix, garden soil. I will link in the video description. I've done a lot of videos on them, the breakdown of all the different types of bag soils and what's inside of them. It's really extensive. It's worth watching. You want to know what you're buying. But you should never buy any product that is filled with stuff like this. This is an example of a bag soil product. And when you buy it, you see all these little bits of perlite in there and you might think, "Oh, this is good stuff." Some sand in there, that's great. But it is loaded with wood fibers.

[00:02:32]As long as you have this quantity of wood fibers in a bagged mix, again, it's going to harm your soil. You really do want to tear the bag open, take a look to see what it is, or buy a bag if you're not comfortable with that. Bring it home, dump it out. If it has big wood particles, it's going to harm your plants. Best thing to do, not buy this.

[00:02:54]Use some of my videos that I link in the video description that teach you what to buy and how to make your own uh mixes really to put in containers and even to amend your raised beds and your garden beds. You never want these fibers, this much wood in your bag products. This is a stunted plant. These are the mustard greens. 60 days. They should absolutely not look like that. And they were actually more yellow last week. But again, with that third, fourth round of a water soluble, they're starting to green up. When your plants are sitting in this type of soil and you see them stop growing, they get yellow. It's really probably because you have too much of the woody product in there. So, really avoid it. Let's look at another place to give you some idea of what's going on. The other thing is timing.

[00:03:40]Like these are mustard greens. Once they germinate, they should accelerate. get to full size in anywhere from like 30 to 45 days. 60 days in, there's something wrong with the soil. Here's another example of how that woody product really messed up the soil using radishes. These radishes were put in on March 1st. Show you an example of what healthy radishes uh should look like. So, again, 60 days sitting here.

[00:04:07]They're struggling. They're beginning to uh bolt and they want to flower, create flowers to recede. Radishes should never look like this. This was an issue again with the woody stuff being mixed through the soil. Maybe you get some radishes, but come on. 60 days later, these should be a lot bigger. I'll show you an example. So, these are all going to get pulled out. Look, here's a radish.

[00:04:35]That's stunted growth. Those are the colors that you're looking for in the leaves that let you know something's going on where these plants don't have enough nitrogen. Now, if you watch that video where I show you what's in different bag products to kind of educate you on what you're buying and how you're spending your money, I have to do something with all that stuff.

[00:04:55]It's kind of expensive and I end up with a lot of soil. So, last year I filled up these raised beds. Garlic did okay in them. thought I amended it well enough to fix the problem with the woody products. And by the way, when you look on a bag, it's going to say forestry product. That's a code for wood. It's going to say natural fibers. That's a code for wood. It's going to say all these kinds of things. Aged wood product, not compost.

[00:05:22]It's aged wood product, which means it could be aged for a week, a year, a month, whatever. It's not quality. It's not going to be good. It should never be in there. The radishes here are in beds that are four years old and there's some wood stuff on top. That's okay. You know, it's been amended. Wood on top of your soil. Like if Well, actually, I'll show you the tomato example, but you can use shredded hardwood on top of your soil. As long as the roots aren't growing into a mix of soil and a bunch of wood, you're fine. Shredded wood on top of your soil as a mulch is actually a really good thing. It keeps moisture in there. It will decay and break down, wash into the root systems of your plant. And it's going to be a great uh field kind of like a buffet for worms to come up and digest the fibers and do things with it, microbes to get in there and multiply. Wood on the surface is okay. Mixed through is a problem. The radishes here will put it in on March 26th, 25 days after the radishes I first showed you. And I've harvested a lot. I just took out a dozen of them last night and here's what we're able to pull out.

[00:06:34]You know, beautiful radishes, nice and green. You can eat the greens. They should be that size. Here's another one.

[00:06:43]This is how quickly radishes should grow. So, from 3:26, they germinate.

[00:06:51]5 weeks later about the radishes should look like that. And this is all because this is pretty good soil. Here's one of my original tomato beds. This guy is about almost probably two feet tall now. Dark green, no yellowing, not struggling. And you see all this wood mulch, you know, top into the soil is never going to be an issue. Companies are taking this, shredding it up more, putting in putting it into their potting mix, container mix, raised bed mix, whatever bag stuff they have, and it's just garbage. You do not want this in any kind of bagged soil product to put into your garden and then grow plants in it on top of the surface. This is this is like gold really. It keeps the moisture in, as I was saying. You know, the soil life loves it. It does wonders. Do not buy products that will have you mixing a lot of this into the root zone of your plants. Here's one of the three beds that I filled with that garbage product from buying it to make videos last year. The spinach in here was struggling. I'm going to cut in some footage from another video. It's from my actually blackberry video and show you what that spinach looked like and then how I fix the soil up and things should be fine. I'm growing maragolds and kale in there now. We'll see what goes right into this space. You essentially want to mix in top soil that does not have the wood. That's just going to be a mixture of clay, silt, um, sand, just soil product, not the wood. Could have some Pete moss in there.

[00:08:28]Or you can add in compost combination of two. If you don't have compost in Maryland, you can get a nice leaf grow product which works really well. There's no woody product in there. a little bit, but you can see like when you look in here, it's mostly leaves. It's not going to be a real issue. So, a quality leaf grow product, a real compost, even when you buy compost nowadays, like black cacao used to be great. I think they got sold. Now, the black cacao product is just shredded wood in a bunch of garbage. It used to be wonderful 3 years ago. So, if you're buying the bagged compost, you also have to check them out. Make sure that they're not full of the woody material. So, mixing in the compost, the leaf grow, some soil. I put in alpha alpha pellets. It's a great organic fertilizer. That's the alpha alpha right there. And it's a slow release. It'll just get mixed into there.

[00:09:25]The soil here is going to be fine. But if you're going to be spending the money to buy bag soil products that are expensive, you don't want to be buying garbage. You know, you want to be buying something quality. And you're really looking for a combination of soil, Pete Moss, maybe cocoa core, quality compost.

[00:09:44]Again, you just don't want wood fibers in your bag.

[00:09:49]The right kind of bag products and build your garden properly. You know, most of my beds are doing fine. This one, actually, I remember is that I just bought a bunch of that those bag products for a video on what not to buy.

[00:10:01]I stuck them all in here. Thought I amended it. Well, it's not working. Your spinach should never look like that if it was planted back, you know, on March 1st. It should be bigger. It should be greener. She's doing a lot more. So, that soil is no good. It's getting warmer. So, this spinach is starting to bolt. But it's beautiful. Look how green it is, how big it is. This is what that spinach should look like.

[00:10:24]This is regular growth, normal growth in decent to good soil, not filled with woody product. the plants aren't being challenged for nitrogen by the decay of that woody product. Again, I'm going to stress, you don't want these woody products mixed in the top two, four, 6, 8 in of your soil. You know, 5 10 20 cm of your soil. It's just going to impact the growth. It is not good stuff.

[00:10:53]The larger spinach was actually planted back in October last year. Spinach over winters here, but that should have been a nice deep green. It shouldn't have been bolting yet. So, it's just not good soil. Heavily handed, I put down a lot of the alpha alpha pellets. This is going to be a slow release fertilizer.

[00:11:13]All your organic granular is typically slow release. That means the microbes have to break it down uh change in this case the alpha alpha into a form of NPNK that the plants can use. So, this is going to, you know, slowly feed the plants over time. And this is more for like next year. So, just throw down your organic granular.

[00:11:35]You know, if you have a lot of compost, you could actually skip this step and save yourself some money. Next step is to put a bunch of compost in here and just mix it into the top four in 10 cm of the soil. One of my favorite things that AI videos do, which I can't do and I haven't mastered in 30 years, is I can't fill a bed without spilling compost or soil all over the place. This is what a real garden looks like.

[00:12:01]soil spilling over the sides.

[00:12:05]The area a little bit unkempt. Nothing's perfect, but slow and steady builds the garden. Take care of what you can when you can. We're all busy. We have other things going on in our lives. But anyway, most of the compost got in here, and this is going to be a great bed.

[00:12:21]Thanks so much for watching. Please check out my seed shop at the rustedgarden.com. I sell tomato and pepper seeds, $1.75 a pack. All other seeds are only $1.50. getting my garden set up for all the summer growing. I'll teach you how to plant just about everything, how to tend it, take care of pests, diseases, talk about harvesting, and just maintaining a garden throughout 2026. Again, thanks so much for watching. If you are interested in growing vertically, Greentock Garden has a sale going on through tomorrow and you can pick up any of these vertical towers for $50 off.

[00:12:59]Use my code, the rusted garden. You'll save even more money. But these are a great way to grow vertically in a little twoft by two foot space.