We garden on a balcony, live in an urban area, and don’t own a car. So there is no easy access to Home Depot or Lowes or gardening stores, where people usually buy soil and potting mix.
We do, though, live close to a small Rite Aid store. And they sell potting mix! What a blessing for us urban gardeners.
Note: It’s really important to buy potting “mix” and not “soil” when using self-watering planter boxes. Regular soil won’t allow the water to wick up from the water reservoir at the bottom of the container.
At Rite Aid, most of the gardening section is listed on sale at 50% off, even on the very first day that the items are put out, in Feburary. The one exception to this sale is the potting mix, which never seems to go on sale.
While shopping at Rite Aid the other day, though, I got a check-out coupon for “20% any item in the store”. So I took our cart and loaded up on Jiffy potting mix.
According to the directions, one Earthbox needs 60 dry quarts of potting mix (2 cubic feet), so we needed 4 bags of this Jiffy potting mix. (Update... after setting up one Earthbox, we only needed 3 of these bags of potting mix. A City Picker planter would also only need 3 bags.)
The original price was $7.99 for 16 dry quarts, the discount brought it down to $6.39 per bag.
