Dirt

I learned a valuable lesson about dirt this summer.

Quality matters.

This can be applied to all sorts of situations in one's life -- the quality of food you put in your body, the quality of the shoes you put on your feet, the quality of the vehicle that shuttles you and your loved ones down the highway at break-neck speeds.... The list goes on.

Soul-searching aside, for the purposes of this post, we'll go with potting soil quality.

My father-in-law does gutter work on the weekends.  For mother's day, he built my mother-in-law a couple of planter boxes made out of gutter.  I thought it was a cute idea, so Michael had him build me a couple one weekend when he was home visiting.

I wasted no time filling them with beautiful Wave Petunias.  After I planted the box on the left, I ran out of potting soil and it was a week before I purchased more and planted the box on the right.  At that point they were still roughly the same size.

It quickly became apparent that the first bag of potting soil I used was of significantly lower quality than the second box.  The photo above was taken a couple of weeks ago, more than two months after the petunias were planted.  The difference is so staggering that I had a difficult time convincing someone that they were the same type of plant.

These petunias were planted in the generic potting soil from Lowe's.  It never got any larger than this.  I definitely won't be purchasing this brand of potting soil again.

These petunias were planted in basic Miracle Grow potting soil that I picked up at Wal-Mart for $8.  The plants thrived in this soil, making it the obvious choice for future planting.

On another note, if you fail to water your plants, regardless of the potting soil type, it's likely that they will croak.