I picked up a good tip for cheap and easy screens from someone in this forum awhile back, I forget who. They suggested fiberglass drywall tape. It is quick and cheap.

Just a thought if you want to try to stick with your normal soil.

I use these 'screens' even in bark based mixes and in the gritty mix. You might want to give it a look - you can do hundreds of pots with a $4 roll of the tape. It takes 1 snip, place it, fill it, done. Literally 2 seconds per pot.

You're probably not going to find anything a whole lot cheaper than something close to the 5:1:1 mix, unless you base your mix on something free.

If you're using nursery cans, you'll probably get a lot of wash out through the drain holes if you use a peaty mix, unless you partially bury the cans.

Al

Thanks redshirtcat, I do have rolls of that around, I'll have to give it a try. I just didn't want to be having customers get pots with big pieces of screen in the bottom.

Hi Al;

I'll have to get some pictures posted. You probably remember that we moved many of our house plants to your mix later last year. We also started using foliage pro. The vast majority of plants did exceptionally well over the winter.

In the mix we made last year, we used turface in it, which made it a little more expensive. I stopped at the local hardware store and found some small western bark mulch for $5 a bag. It looks far superior to the best bark mulch I found last year. It is very consistent in size and doesn't appear to have have much in the way of fines in the bag. I don't think it will need to be screened. I'll get some pictures of this bark mulch and post.

Thanks

Jamie