EcoThrive – Eco-Life Living Soil

The Ultimate Organic Potting Mix

Looking for the ultimate organic potting mix? Eco-Life is a supercharged living soil that’s packed full of premium quality organic inputs and beneficial microbiology. Crafted by Gareth and his team at Ecothrive in collaboration with soil specialist Ben at Indoor Organics, this ready-to-use living organic soil is ideal for filling your fabric pots, growing containers and raised beds. Rich and diverse with a perfect blend of compost, aeration and organic nutrient sources, Eco-life can support hungry plants for their complete lifecycle. It can also be re-used and regenerated time and time again, making Eco-Life a truly sustainable solution for ecologically-minded organic cultivation.

In Harmony with Nature

Growing plants is surprisingly easy when you work with nature. And you can leave those expensive bottles of nutrients and boosters on the gardening shop shelf because Eco-Life already contains everything your plants will need from seedling or cutting, right through to harvest. It’s fully loaded with the fundamental building blocks of nutrition required for full term growth, with minimal additional inputs required. Most importantly, it’s packed full of a diverse blend of the microbiology needed to break it down into plant-available forms. No measuring cups, no deficiencies, no lockouts, no burn… just perfect beautiful, healthy and vigorous plants.

All you need to do is keep your plants moist, and use enough soil for the target size of the plant. Plant something. Water it. Watch it grow. It really is that simple.

This latest version of Eco-Life is produced indoors for full control of the potting soil preparation process. We now use pumice instead of perlite, high quality, washed coco fibre, Irish peat and premium vermicompost to give growers an even higher quality organic soil.

Also, as part of our concerted effort to minimise plastic waste, Eco-Life is now packaged in a cardboard box with a thin LDPE plastic liner that is much easier to recycle.
True, Living, Organic Potting Soil

Eco-Life is a real potting soil, made with organic natural inputs to replicate the microbial magic that occurs in nature. It contains everything growers need to create the thriving microbial population required to break down organic nutrients so that they’re available to the plants, just when they need it.

Growing is So Easy with Eco-Life!

Fill your containers with Eco-Life, plant up, and keep them moist—that’s it! No need to mix up feeds or adjust pH! All you need to focus on is developing a good watering technique (gradual, even wetting) in order to maintain optimal soil conditions. Growers tell us constantly that they are amazed by the results with so little headwork!

Eco-Life soil is different to traditional bagged soils and soilless substrates. There’s no need for liquid nutrients as the nutrition is already loaded into the soil. All you need to do to help the microbes make it available is to keep the soil moist. Your plants will do the rest.

“Black Gold”

Eco-Life is based on a blend of naturally sourced inputs that replicate a humus-rich fertile soil. All of the ingredients we use are multi-nutritional and offer growth-stimulating benefits to maximise plant health, vigour and immunity. Also, by mixing in a range of long, medium and short release ingredients, Eco-Life is capable of giving your plants everything they need from seed until harvest.

Carefully Blended by Organic Soil Experts

You can thank us later! We’ve done all the work in advance to supercharge the potting soil with our special blend of amendments. These top quality organic inputs are then blended with peat and premium-grade coco coir and just the right amount of pumice in order to give you a high-quality organic soil that comes ready to fill your containers.

As the end of the crop cycle approaches, plants will begin to mature naturally. There’s no need to ‘flush’ the media, as many container growers do. (If no additional feeds were added then there is nothing to remove from the soil.) Your plants will sense that it’s time to focus on maturity and ripening. There’s no need to heavily flood the soil or to use any flushing agents.

Give Your Plants The Very Best Organic Potting Mix

Perfect soil structure

After extensive trials and testing, we created a custom mix of peat, Coco Coir, Vermicompost and Pumice that has the perfect structure for optimal water retention while maintaining optimal aeration. It will hold water well to reduce run-off but also minimise the likelihood of overwatering thanks to its excellent aeration. This enhances optimal root development and aerobic conditions for good microbes. This careful balance of water and air holding capacity is the foundation of healthy roots.

Bursting with Biology

Without bacteria and fungi your soil is essentially dead. Beneficial biology is an essential part of healthy plant development in organic soil environments. The multitude of microbes in your soil is responsible for unlocking the nutrition from the raw materials. The microbes work with your plants to make nutrition available. A key component of Eco-Life is our own, supercharged vermicompost. It helps to kickstart the microbial life that characterises a healthy, living soil. Compost is the key to healthy soil and we’ve got it covered!

Eco-Friendly Production Process

Eco-Life soil is carefully blended and boxed indoors at Ecothrive’s HQ in Sheffield, UK. All of our inputs come from sustainable sources so you can be sure that every effort has been taken to protect the planet in the making and mixing of Eco-Life. We are fully transparent with all sources and investigate all inputs back to origin before approving them for our production process. There probably isn’t a more sustainable way to grow without having to go to the lengths we have!

What’s in Eco-Life?

Eco-Life contains; Coco Coir, Irish Peat, Pumice, Vermicompost (Worm Castings), Mealworm Frass (Charge), Neem Cake, Seaweed meal, Insect meal, Rock Phosphate, Volcanic Rockdust, Gypsum, Calcium and Magnesium Limestone & Humic and Fulvic Acids. Loaded with organic nutrition, these natural inputs supercharge the potting soil.

Premium Seaweed Meal

We sometimes call this “green gold” because of all the treasures it brings to the soil! Our seaweed meal is exclusively sourced from the highly-prized species Ascophyllum nodosum and contains an impressive spectrum of minerals—over 60 trace elements! This incredible, natural soil amendment gives your plants a luxurious nutritional diet complemented with valuable natural plant growth hormones including cytokinins to help drive cell division and speed up growth, auxins and gibberellins for assisting the mobility of essential nutrients, and indoles for turbocharged root development.

Neem

Neem is a potent source of soil fertility largely thanks to being a nutrient accumulator itself. Neem has deep reaching roots which pull up nutrition from deep down below the soil surface where other plants can’t reach. Neem is rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium as well as calcium and magnesium. As an additional key benefit, neem also helps to ward off soil pests and pathogens.

Basalt Rock Dust
The “magic ingredient” for essential trace elements and silica—essential for optimal plant health and vigour but often lacking from lesser soil mixes. Trace minerals form the building blocks of enzymes, proteins and many other metabolites while silica helps plants to grow big and strong with thick stems and branches to support heavy yields.

Rock Phosphate

Providing a long term slow release of phosphorus, rock phosphate is added to our Eco-Life mix to raise this key nutrient and allow the beneficial soil biology to steadily deliver it to the plant. Phosphorus is a key nutrient for all plants and plays an important role in root development, vegetative growth and fruit and flower production.

Gypsum

Gypsum is a great source of calcium, one of the most important nutrients for healthy plants in all growing situations! Calcium is needed for healthly leaf, fruit and flower development. The other beneficial side to gypsum is the sulphur which improves aroma, flavour development and overall health in fast-growing plants.

Insect Meal

Our ecologically-sourced crustacean meal replacement! Insect meal is very similar to crustacean meal in its nutrient profile, but has very low sodium, making it an ideal living soil amendment. Rich in amino acids, nitrogen and phosphorus, this is a great source of nutrition for the plants, and for the soil biology. Most importantly, Insect meal is much more sustainable than crustacean meal, the insects are black soldier fly larvae and are grown indoors on controlled food waste streams. The time has come to stop depleting our oceans, and small moves like this can make a difference.

Mealworm Frass (Ecothrive Charge)

Our flagship product, Charge, is well-known for its nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium boosting power, as well as being an excellent food source for beneficial microbes. This natural and ecological product helps to boost key primary nutrients in your soil mix. As a secondary benefit, mealworm frass also contains tiny fragments of mealworm skins and other body parts providing a great source of chitin to stimulate plant immune response and elevate defences.

Vermicompost (Worm Castings)

This is the crucial ingredient that makes everything else work! We like to think of our premium quality vermicompost as the engine room of the soil mix. It introduces the bacteria and fungi required to break down the other inputs and make nutrients available to the plants. We use worm castings from an indoor worm farm where the worms are allowed to feed naturally on a luxurious (for worms!) diet of well aged aerobic thermophilic compost. The quality of the resulting worm castings is unbeatable. Adding a plethora of beneficial microbes, as well as extra nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium and micronutrients, these incredibly high quality worm castings are the heartbeat of our living soils.

Humic and Fulvic Acids

Humus is the final product of decomposition and is rich in humic and fulvic acids. Life-Cycle contains both humic and fulvic acids derived from naturally mined deposits of ancient vegetation. These key fractions are great at chelating nutrients making them easy for plants to uptake, as well as stimulating microbial activity and improving plant health and root growth.

Eco-Life is So Easy to Use!

To get the full benefits of using Eco-Life, we recommend using approximately 180-250L per 1.2m2.
We highly recommend using 45L per pot, with 4 pots per 1.2m2.
Other pot sizes will also work, as long as you get the soil volume to area on point. For example; 2 x 90L pots, 6 x 30L pots, or one big 200L bed would all be suitable.
If you want to learn more about why Eco-Life living soil is so unique and special, or if you have any questions at all, then please do not hesitate to get in touch with Indoor Organics or Ecothrive. We are working hard to change the way growers think about the materials they use and, in turn, helping everyone to grow better plants. Try Eco-Life and join us in making organic growing easier and more cost effective than ever before!