Soil ingredients

I met a woman who owns an organic farm nearby, and she said that all she uses to grow her plants is sand and peat moss. She uses only worm tea for nutrients. However, I bought a plant from her and when I went to transplant it into a bigger pot, I noticed those white styrofoam looking things...is that perlite? Not sure why she didn't mention that in her answer to me about her soil recipe...hmm...

If she does only use sand and peat moss....It seems like this would be a pretty inexpensive mixture for my raised vegetable beds. Would it work? Has anyone tried this or something close?

I haven't filled my raised beds with soil yet, but if I do the vermiculite, peat moss, and compost mixture (recommended by the square foot garden guy), its going to cost hundreds of dollars.

I'd check out tapla's sticky threads in the container gardening forum, there are some good container mix recipes in there. I know you're doing a raised bed not a container but you could probably still do something similar. I'm not sure about the sand and peat moss mixture, I think without having some other stuff in there if you let the peat get a little dry it's going to be really hard to rewet. And peat is acidic, so it may not be right for all types of plants.

I started doing organic gardening 5 years ago with peat moss, and bark mulch soil additives. The second year I discovered that I could use grasses, leaves, pine needles, which were on my 5 acres. Rodale Publishing has lots of books on organic gardening.

It sounds like an awfully sterile growing medium for mature plants. The plants will be totally dependent on you fertilizing them on a regular basis because they will be getting no nutrition from the soil. Good soil and compost are all full of wonderful living microbial stuff that plants love in addition to the nutrients they provide. I did extensive testing on the nasty clay fill soil that surrounded my house. The best results, by a long shot, were a third each of soil, cotton burr compost (chemical-free) and extremely coarse sand.

If you do end up using peat make sure that you wet it down very well as you are doing your beds. Dry peat resists absorbing water something fierce and if you have dry peat below the surface of your bed it will never absorb any moisture.

Veggies need more than sand and peat moss...I use well aged cow poo....and lucurne hay...animal manures (aged) and used mushroom compost....whatever is at hand....the worms will take it down into the soil and do the rest. The sand and peat moss mix is used to strike plants and sprout seeds...there may have been some confusion about that.