Hi I was curious if freezing my soil would kill off any bugs egg’s etc or would I be better off mixing my soil with earth @plumbdand
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Freezing for at least 2 wks would kill off bugs & eggs.
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How much soil are we taking about? What temperature are you gonna freeze it to?
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What’s your intent? Is this precautionary? Do you have bugs in it already?
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I hope that freezing your soils works out for you. My understanding is that many insects and their eggs survive freezing, just going dormant during freezing temperatures.
Good luck getting rid of your pests.
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I think you’d need to get the temperature close to zero and sustain it for quite awhile. Even doing that some bugs eggs can survive. Most won’t. You’d be better off heating/cooking the soil at 212+ degrees that would kill everything in the soil. You’d have to add mycorrhizae and other microbes back into the soil. Id also mix it in with some new soil and give it some time to let the microbes reestablish themselves.
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I used to bake soil harvested from the outdoors for indoor growing. Lol.
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I’d bake it if it were me. Black plastic garbage bags laid out in the full sun for a few days would probably do it.
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LOL hindsight. Back in the day I was loading tray after tray into the oven, wish I would have thought about contractor bags. Hahaha
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Two bags of fox farms ocean forest the 1.5 bag I think is the size of the bag not sure what temp it would be was going to throw them in my buddy’s deep freezer
I was going to freeze just out of precaution @Budbrother
Thanks everyone for your help
Ahh then cook it or do something like a soil drench with Safer soap and Azamax, Spinosad or BT to not kill off beneficials.
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I like the black trash bag idea for cooking soil. I cover areas of my back yard with black 6ml plastic. I leave it there for a couple months. After that nothing grows there for the rest of the year.