I have always said never reuse soil unless your strictly organically growing. but I have found if you rinse the soil really well and dump it in a box for a while to mature (a few months) it seems to work quite nicely. I guess it composts down and finds an equilibrium with the bacteria and nutrients. this method isn't fully tested but I have done it a couple of times now and all seems well I have re-used soil straight away in the past and had nutrient imbalances so I don't recommend that
Gold Grower is right - an organic soil can be used over and over again, in fact, I will dig a 1 gallon hole out of a freshly harvested pot and drop a new plant into this hole. I've done this a dozen times in a row with no drop in either quality or quantity, and would have done more but shut the room down for a few months. If you are using bottled nutrients I don't see why you wouldn't be able to reuse it as you are basically using it as an inert medium anyhow at that point and adding nutrition from your bottles. If you're unsure, then dump all your old buckets of soil into a pile in your back yard, break them apart, re-amend them with some worm castings, kelp meal, even a blended organic fertilizer such as Epsoma Plant Tone or Garden Tone, etc., wet it all down and let it sit for several months as GG suggested. This will give soil microbes an opportunity to break down your dry fertilizers into usable plant nutrients. J
this is the box I keep my soil in, it's plastic lined but can still breath out the top. I never use raw organic fertilisers, like manure, but my bottled nutrients are organic. I'm gradually moving to hydro now anyway so I don't use as much soil as I used to. leaving it to mature over a few months seems to sort it out nicely
Hey babybud! I have some living testimony for you! I have run many small to medium sized grows in different settings. Grasscity was amazing guiding my through my first grow which was a year or so ago. Anyway! Due to funding and well slight laziness I have done this with two back to back auto flowering grows. I had two ~3 gallon air pots filled with fox farm light warrior, one auto flowering plant in each pot. After their 2 month run, I harvested, upon removing the trunks I noticed the majority of the root mass had not gone halfway into the pot. So I tilled the crap out of both pots, and put two more beans in, and the second batch grew much denser and healthier. This may be due to the soil now having traces of my Advanced Nutrients, which is what I was feeding my first batch. However it also may be natural nutrients that the second round obtained from the roots that the previous plants left behind! I hope this helped! It worked for me, and I had better results with my used soil!