We use our pot emptyings to fill holes in and reseed the lawn.

The short answer is no, I wouldn't. The medium breaks down, which is why you have to repot your potted hosta every few years.

bk

media is a water management system... retaining what water the plant needs.. and shedding excess ...

it is replaced when the predictability of water movement is lost.. making it harder and harder to water properly ...

the beauty of having the same media in all your pots... is that you can figure out how to water every similar sized pot the same ...

so.. once you start having a variety of medias.. you start have problems ... just think of the grower who has 100,000 pots... he wants to know they all have the same water needs ...

once you start trying to reclaim media... who knows what you will end up with ... and probably will have spent more trying to fix it.. rather than just starting with what you know how to use ...

i used to just hrow it in garden beds as a soil amendment .. or the compost pile .... but.. you dont have garden beds.. so i dont know what to tell you ... id hate to just throw it away... do you have any local garden friends with inground gardens??

ken

As someone who gardens extensively in containers, yes, you can re-use potting soil. But it depends on how long the soil was in use to begin with and the quality of that soil at the start. A high quality, durable container soil/potting media that has only been in use for a couple of seasons can be re-used if mixed at least 50-50 with fresh media. A inferior, less durable mix (something like Miracle Gro) or one that has been in use for 3 or more years should get tossed (in the garden or in the compost heap).

Also any used container soil in which a disease was present should also be tossed.

I do as suggested above. I mix 50/50 old and new and add pine bark fines. If its for succulents I also add turface. I have probably 50 containers. I use my excess to pot up plants to give away as you can't give away plants with garden dirt on them any more. That usually uses it all up. I have put some in the garden but too much causes drainage problems there.