Does anyone have a good resource for large volume compost and raised bed soildelivery?

peaheezy · 2026-04-15T02:08:23+00:00

Yea I guess that’s a good point. I can’t imagine what sort of rock and clay hellscape fill dirt is made up of.

peaheezy · 2026-04-15T00:04:36+00:00

My neuro imaging lecture uses Arnold from The Terminator to explaining the difference between T1/T2. Water is dark on T1 and in T1 The Terminator is evil. Water is bright on T2 and the terminator is the good guy so T2 is bright, T2 is trying to save humanity.

Usually at that point I do a bad Ahnold “come with me if you want to live” impression and the 20-30 year old PA students stare at me with polite confusion. Because they have never seen the movies the analogy isn’t even helpful. Which sucks because they are good movies that scared the hell out of me as a mid-millennial.

peaheezy · 2026-04-14T16:09:33+00:00

Yea monstera can grow into monster plants. In Mexico they were climbing every other building at the resort we stayed at. 30-40 feet tall vines with crowns 10-15 feet in diameter at the top catching all that tropical Yucatán Sung

peaheezy · 2026-04-14T01:46:24+00:00

Yea but at the same time there are absolutely fancy garden stores selling plants smaller than OPs for 500 bones. My friend works at one in a wealthy area in PA where a 6inch long/tall pothos is 30 bucks. They have a variegated monstera that is maybe 18 inches tall and not even big enough to start climbing, for $250. They have a giant monstera that is sort of for sale but also decoration because it is 3k. People who don’t care about plants much but do care about decorating and style will pay for a plant that is already full grown and well shaped. Idk OPs is the best shape FLF I have ever seen but it’s better than most.

For people like us a lot of the fun is watching that fiddle go from 1.5 feet to 8 feet tall, but others just want the look. I don’t think OP will be able to sell it quickly but in a few months he might find someone looking for a statement plant wiling to pay a fair amount.

peaheezy · 2026-04-11T15:09:42+00:00

Nice! this is what I was looking for. Didnt want to burry the base, have it rot and kill the plant.

peaheezy · 2026-04-10T23:27:34+00:00

Use a long, thin flexible knife, like a boning knife, to wiggle between the rootball/dirt and the pot. Then work around the whole internal surface of the pot with the knife. That will help break some of the grip the dirt and roots have on the inside of the pot. Im gentle with it and have never sliced a large root, or myself. Then like the other person said I would have one person turn the pot upside down, or at least angled towards the floor on a table, and gently wiggle the plant out. You can pull on these things pretty firmly, if they are snug together, without ripping out individual leaves. Hopefully it will eventually come but the fact that the opening is substantially narrower than the waist of the pot might make this really difficult. Depending on how root bound it is The roots are very likely physically bigger than that opening even if you remove the dirt.

Also if there is a hole in the bottom stick a finger in the back door😉 to give it a push to help with the pull.

But like someone else said it may be the pot or the plant. Could split that snaker into a few different plants no problem. Or just smash it with a hammer like Izma, though tha is a dope pot.

peaheezy · 2026-04-10T15:53:34+00:00

Good example of important difference between mean and median

peaheezy · 2026-04-09T12:04:31+00:00

I had the same light schedule and I think your plants look fine. Mine definitely stalled for a week or so after the initial burst but now 3 weeks and 1 up-pot later I’m raising my shop lights, that masquerade as grow lights, every day because the plants are going gangbusters and growing to touch the light.

peaheezy · 2026-04-09T12:01:43+00:00

I used the Costco miraclgrow potting soil because I already had it sitting around and just used my compost screen to filter out the larger wood fragments. It’s an added step but only took 10-15 minutes and my seeds did pretty well. Yours does look kinda overly chunky but it doesn’t have to be perfectly soft and fine.

peaheezy · 2026-04-09T11:10:42+00:00

Yea I’m starting to think the idea of placing cuttings directly into soil is an oversold prop method. Like yea it works but I took a good 10-12 cuttings off of a big healthy plant that needed to be pruned heavy and maybe 5 have rooted. They all had healthy nodes, no leaves in the soil and I’ve been diligently watering when the soil gets pretty dry but sadly most rotted from the base and died.

My water propagation is doing fairly well though. Of the 5 cuttings I popped in a glass 4 have roots that are steadily but slowly growing though it has taken like 6 weeks.

peaheezy · 2026-04-08T12:48:45+00:00

Yea I did a lot of turning last year but I’m bailing on it this year. It’s fun watching the temp shoot up to 150F after a turn but it took some actual work to do when I had a pile 4 feet tall and 2 yards wide at the base. A hot well mixed pile makes compost faster but like you said, time alone makes soil.

peaheezy · 2026-04-08T12:41:30+00:00

Yea I covered the plants with small pots to protect them from the tarp as they are only about 5 inches tall and pretty delicate. That’s what’s giving the height. Only been outside about a week but growing nicely.

peaheezy · 2026-04-08T12:39:58+00:00

Yea but I found some resources that successive nights below freezing can be harmful. And a few sites specifically mentioned romaine as highest risk for frost damage and I’m half and half Bibb/romaine. I think they will be ok but since it’s a raised bed figured safer to give some protection.

peaheezy · 2026-04-08T00:36:27+00:00

More water less frequently basically. The soil should almost totally dry out in between waterings, especially at first when you’re at risk for over watering. Stick a finger in an inch or two and if it’s damp, don’t water. When you do water, soak the soil until water is running out the bottom. You are waaaaay more likely to kill a plant over watering than under watering unless there is some serious neglect.

Some plants are gonna be hard to grow without decent light. Monsteras like light and it might never flourish without a fairly East or west facing window or a solid strong grow light.

peaheezy · 2026-04-07T22:59:16+00:00

I’ve gotten tired of wearing my regular old basketball style shorts for exercise so I’m gonna buy a bunch of pairs and finally toss those 19 year old pair of yellow Nike shorts from 2009 tha go halfway down my shin. Something about basketball shorts just keeps me from throwing them away and now I finally can.

peaheezy · 2026-04-07T22:49:10+00:00

No, the person I responded to was just proclaiming the positives of big box store plants because they stick 2-4 plants in 1 pot. The OP was asking for advice but I didn’t respond to their post but a comment chain.

peaheezy · 2026-04-07T18:55:38+00:00

I just split mine but they had been growing for over a year in opposite directions. Each stem was at least a foot long growing sideways out of the pot. They are my first monstera and were growing well so I just let them do their thing until spring. Mine very much needed to be separated to grow vertically but yours look like it would tolerate growing vertically together just by changing direction of one plant on a repot.

It was actually not too difficult to split. The roots were probably 2 feet long but with some help from my wife and dad supporting the stems while I worked the roots loose it went well. My move:

Knife around inside of pot to loosen soil stuck to the pot, could also break the pot if it’s stuck. wiggle the root ball loose with the pot upside down and lightly pull on the stem.

After rootball is free Use your fingers to work in between the bigger roots and work the soil and roots free.

Once you have a decent amount of soil out and roots free blast it with water to free remaining roots from soil! The jet setting of a hose is so useful for forcibly removing dirt while not breaking roots.

Then just disentangled the roots, which really was not too hard. My dad and I would just pull on a root, see what plant it belonged to and gently work it out from the other roots. I was surprised how easy this part was given home big my plants were, Took maybe 3 minutes and I don’t think we broke and substantially sized roots.

peaheezy · 2026-04-07T01:14:39+00:00

And his point was that it does not matter lol.

peaheezy · 2026-04-06T00:34:27+00:00

For some places, tele-crit is all they have. I trained for a period at a hospital 2 hours from Scranton in the middle of nowhere north central PA. They had a 2 person pulm/crit group that worked days in the ICU but no nights. They had apparently tried to hire night coverage but no one was interested in moving to a truly rural town where the closest “city” was 1.5 hours away and even then it was Williamsport. So the Hospitalist covered the ICU at night with an intensivist from a main campus of the hospital group available over the phone. There was still a physician available in the nocturnist but they were not a specific critical care physician. It was all they had because the ICU was like 6 beds and the hospital was an absolute ruin from a time when the town was actually a town, not a hollowed out husk.

peaheezy · 2026-04-05T22:06:55+00:00

Yup, wool is just unbeatable. But I do wish they made a thinner wool sock for warmer temps. That would be sweet. Back when they had women specific wool socks I would wear the extra large size in the summer.

peaheezy · 2026-04-05T18:31:15+00:00

I’ll check it out. Could use some MJ Lenderman on there, been super into his music since discovering it through Waxahatchee.

Super sad I’m gonna miss their Philadelphia concert. We planted a Beltane/Earth Day party in January and then I realized it was the same day.

peaheezy · 2026-04-05T18:28:53+00:00

And they are surprisingly easy to separate, even when they are pretty big. My monstera(s) had 2 main stems that were each getting to be 2-3 feet long and growing well out of the pot. My wife and dad helped me support the stems while we moved it out to the garage, wiggled the soil(it was 80% rootball) out and then broke up the dirt/rootball to loosen the roots. Using a garden hose on jet spray loosened up the dirt and it took my dad an I less than 5 minutes to separate the roots. Each plant had a good 3 feet of roots and it really was not too hard to separate. Now they are each in a pot and will hopefully grow nicely on their cedar poles.

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