In the spring, when we start filling up our pots, trays, and containers we always try to find the best substrate possible for our new plants and seedlings. Not all the plants like every substrate, and not every substrate is the same. But, over the years I realized that the price of the substrate doesn’t really have much to do with the quality. Also, that the substrate which was good one year, can be bad the next year. This is why I don’t really bother with buying high-quality bags for the yard flowers. I used to buy professional substrate for all my plants, but after having a bad case of root rot, which was caused by one of the newly bought bags, I decided that there’s no point in buying expensive substrate for yard plants when clearly price doesn’t mean quality anymore.

This is why I started buying normal, supermarket substrate. I buy a bag from different places to see which one is good in the current year, and then I continue buying it throughout the year.  

This year I found one in our supermarket online store which is actually excellent for the price. It contains a mixture of humus and white peat. It’s very light and doesn’t make lumps. Also, the content of nutrients is satisfactory, the seedlings don’t require any additional food, and big plants grow excellent with water fertilization every 14 days.

I was so satisfied with the substrate that I didn’t even notice its small problem at first. I was getting burned each time I was watering my surfinias, and I had no idea why. At first, I thought that it was the ants or some kind of wasp hiding in the plant until the perpetrator finally grew big enough to be able to see it.

I had stinging nettle growing out of my surfinias. It clearly came with the substrate. Here we have no native stinging nettle growing anywhere in the village. The only thing that grows here is dead nettle. I’ve never seed a stinging one growing in the meadows or forests here. People sow and grow stinging nettle as ornamental plants, they never spread from the sown place and don’t grow like weeds. They only cover the area in which you sow it.

After the nettle, other weeds started to appear, and soon I had to weed out my containers like they were in the middle of the garden.

Still, the biggest surprise was when I noticed 2 sunflower plants growing out of one of the containers. Of course, I can’t be sure that these seeds weren’t dropped by birds into the containers, but I’m certain that I didn’t plant them. I also didn’t use any old soil, manure, or substrate, so there’s no chance of the seeds being left over by the last years’ sunflowers. 

Either way, now I have 2 sunflowers growing in the containers and one of them is already flowering, it looks funny, but I felt bad about cutting them, so I left them to grow. At least now I know that sunflowers don’t need much soil to grow, which gave me an idea to grow sunflowers in my new flower containers next year.

Even with the weeds and stinging nettle, I’ll still be buying the same substrate next year, if it doesn’t go bad, of course. The quality is still way better than most of the substrates available here, and I can always look forward to the next surprise. Who knows, maybe I’ll get some nice flowers extra next year.