My potting soil too wet, help!

Last Updated on May 8, 2021 by cmoarz

So your potting soil is too wet, huh, We’ve all been there. When your first starting out with container gardening, you will find something is always either too dry or too wet. That can be a problem when trying to grow and maintain healthy plants. But fear not! It’s an easy fix solution to the problem and it starts with knowing why it happens to begin with.

The problem: why is my potting soil always too wet?

A few factors go into this, but to sum it up in a few brief points:

• You don’t have enough drainage in the container
• The soils is packed too densely
• you are simply over watering a plant that might not need as much to begin with
• The type of soil you have may be hydrophobic

The Solution

• Drill a few additional drainage holes in the bottom of the container
• Loosen compacted soil a bit and create smaller channels or holes in the soil
• Look up the plant you are having difficulties with and see how often it actually needs to be watered. We wrote an article on this here
• Make sure you are using the appropriate type of soil for your particular plant

Some more options to consider

Why not make your life easier and remove the need to do any manual watering at all? No mo problems as they say. You should consider setting up a Raindrip R560DP automatic watering kit  Or something similar to take care of everything for you. What is that? Basically, it’s everything you need to get started with drip irrigation and automating all your watering jobs. Definitely a great time saver and allows you to grow more without adding an additional workload to your already busy schedule.

or you could end up going a bit cheaper and check out the auto watering stem. They are more affordable but are not automated. You will need to manually fill them up every once and a while (it depends on the plant and how much water it is drinking). But it’s a good option since the plant will only take what it need’s, so no risk of drowning it.

You should consider these options as a way to remove the labor and uncertainty that come with watering manually. While they are a bit more expensive than just dumping in the water yourself, in the long run, they can allow you to expand your garden way more than you thought you could as well as gives even more time to do other things during the day. I hope this article answered your question!

How to dry out soil quickly

In a perfect world, all of your plants would be growing in well-drained soil. In reality, sometimes the ground around your plants can get wet and stay that way for days or weeks on end. If you want to keep your garden healthy and lush, then it’s important to know how to dry out soil quickly so that roots don’t rot or suffocate.

Besides the other steps mentioned in this article, like making sure there is adequate drainage, one of the best things you can do to get your soil dry in an emergency as fast as possible is to simply remove the plant and transplant it into dryer soil.

Another less drastic method is to give it even more sunshine. This will help the soil dry out by removing moisture from the soil (assuming you can move it to a sunnier spot of course).

If you find it’s just too much sun for your delicate plant, Then shade the plant itself but leave the dirt uncovered.