@tapla (mid-Michigan, USDA z5b-6a) Except for you and a handful of others very few on Gardenweb are immersed in soil science. I was hoping to find a discussion group comprised of academics.

Have you considered taking some college level courses yourself? That may be sufficient to answer most of your questions. Otherwise there are various state and national soil science associations, some of which accept open membership. But honestly, it's hard to imagine a forum or chatroom full of academics who focus on big picture issues that would be willing to enter into a detailed discussion with Joe Home Gardener.

@gardengal48 (PNW Z8/9) I engage with professional groups all the time. The trick, in this case, is to not ask questions that make you sound like Joe Home Gardener.

I was wondering the same, except my job is with medical documentation at the laboratory level. I do have to disagree with the above. I'm always happy to discuss what happens with anybody who asks and always pleased to answer questions in an appropriate forum if somebody should ask. Not many ask, it's not exactly a fascinating field.

However, I must say that after a review of the material here, I would also recommend taking courses at your local college instead.

@Simon I have already read college-level texts on soil science. The problem is that almost all of these are focused on farm crop soil, not on the somewhat different needs of raising ornamental plants in raised beds, and certainly not the specific problems associated with containers.

At this point, I am trying to develop commercial relationships with college professors, which is time-consuming, but someone who can condense textbooks and 40 years of experience into one paragraph of instructive text is worth his or his weight in gold (or at least expensive plants :) )

I quite understand, as my personal concern is with garden beds and containers myself. Information available tends to be extremely inconsistent and at best questionable in terms of quality with poor understanding of the way materials and soils retain resources. The best recommendations seem to involve mindlessly pouring resources onto mixes because that's the way it's always been done.

The ability to explain, preferably with a minimum of narcissism and negative reaction to challenge when something isn't consistent to what's already known and, quite bluntly, obvious, is absolutely worth its weight in refined plutonium when you put it all together. It's also about as rare and something I've only seen once or twice in the public forum.

I have to start working with texts on soil science myself, point in fact. In my spare time, which I may have in late August.

@Simon Review Tapla's many posts here on container soil science. He covers perched water tables and particle sizing very well. He will occasionally answer questions.

With all due respect, I've included many people in my review and still recommend taking courses at your local college instead.

You would have to read a LOT of college level soil science texts to even begin to approach the knowledge base Al/tapla possesses! What he doesn't know about container gardening and container soil mixes and water movement and retention is not worth knowing.

btw, very few college level soil science classes or even soil science fora will address container gardening and its unique requirements simply because it is so distinct and separate from inground soil science. The two are only very tangentially related.

I took a container growing course during my horticulture studies at Va. Tech. It was a full semester course, covering all of the essentials of container culture, including the formulation of a variety of growing mediums.

Much later in my career, as head of the horticulture department at the local community college, I made sure to offer such a course as part of the curriculum. We not only made different types of container mediums but studied the results in a variety of methods.

I don't believe that courses like that are particularly rare. Nor are textbooks on the subject. I'll investigate it for you, just out of curiosity.

I'd be curious to see what you dig up as well, Rhizo, as I'd rather see the results of a knowledge-based curricula and science-based textbook and study analysis.

@gardengal48 (PNW Z8/9) I agree completely regarding Tapla's knowledge of container science. I am not a horticultural expert and have no formal training as one. Without Tapla's posts, I would have spent years completely misunderstanding the behavior of soil in a container.

While I'll take another look, I cannot say that I've been overly impressed with the science at any level on this site. Then again, it doesn't feature any actual current scientists that I've seen, and that would be my standard as that's who I generally work with.

My standards are pretty high and my observations, where I've bothered to enumerate them differ., not that I much bother. This isn't my primary field nor my secondary. Regrettably, I can see that it also isn't the primary or secondary fields of some who exercise sway here, and that is a problem.

@Simon Can you give your context for your interest? You said you are a professor with a department under your control, so that is important to understand. What subjects? Is your interest in horticulture part of your professional work or a personal interest?

Since you have such a deep interest in this topic, can I suggest that you start a closed group on Facebook, then carefully screen all new entrants to make sure you get the kind of people you want? Maybe start to recruit professional contacts into that group. It might take a few years, but the group might end up being an important place to dive into these topics.

This forum is not a peer-reviewed journal, so applying academic standards for evidence presented here is not really appropriate. There are some container soil threads in which apparatus are set up and data reported for things like water retention of different materials, and those posts have real value.

Other than that, I would say you are going to have to create that which you seek from the ground up.

@Simon They also occasionally shadow ban posts so that the user still thinks the post is live on the site but no one else can see it. Social media was supposed to expand democracy and instead has become the greatest restriction of free speech since maybe the last world war.