Friday, October 31, 2014

Something NOT to buy

One of the reasons I started blogging was to give myself a space to review things and mostly for that I've reviewed cars, here's something different:

I picked up this bag of Schultz Potting Soil Plus at Tractor Supply last spring. I wanted to use it to start plants in the house. The bag says "A rich mix of sphagnum peat moss, perlite, composted organic material and a wetting agent" which as near as I can tell means a little peat moss mixed with what could best be termed "mulch" but seems to be wood chips, and some little pellets of some magic chemical. What it seems to do mostly is nothing. About 1 in 30 seeds actually germinated, those that did were spindly and barely grew.
In about July I put some of the mix into a hole in my front yard, in September it looked like this:

Remember I said it looked like much? Thats what it looks like on the ground... Notice how weeds won't even grow on it. I've got 2 other spots in my yard I put this stuff on and those are dead zones too.

I found an Amazon review for the same stuff in a different bag: http://www.amazon.com/Schultz-Purpose-Potting-Soil-20140/product-reviews/B000HAAO04 which mostly echos my experience.

I'm going to write a note to Schultz on their website but don't expect much.

I have a follower, and 10,000+ views!

Holy crap after 6 years somebody finally signed up as a follower! You might remember just over a year ago I was crying that nobody was reading this blog: http://curtsotherblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/i-think-i-should-be-slightly-concerned.html at that point I was getting around 1,000 views a year. In the past year I've had around 4,000, thats a pretty significant increase especially when you consider I've made around half as many posts in 2014 when compared with 2014. I was putting out updates pretty regularly in September but have fallen apart in October. In fact I'm really glad I got to write this today so I can at least have written something in October. Lets look at my YouTube numbers too (Youtube channel Curtludwig) which I had mentioned in my post had 199 subscribers, today I have 415 Youtube subscribers which frankly amazes me since I've put out exactly zero videos in 2014. I've had great plans to put out videos in 2014 and in fact have shot around 4 hours of video most of which has not met my standards for production and will never get seen. Such is the sad state of being a video professional and trying to put out stuff in my spare time. Anyway I'm actually very pleased, the money I make from ad revenue on the blog is basically nothing, I write this stuff for the satisfaction of knowing that somebody is reading it. Okay enough of this, I do have a real post for you which I'll start working on as soon as I'm done with this one.