Tropical Rainforest Topsoil OK as Potting Soil Medium?

[agroventuresperu]

Do you think it would be OK to use just the broken down litter layer, and the very thin topsoil layer of our tropical forest soil to fill 3-gallon plant pots for growing jackfruit seeds?

They don't have any good potting soil products available locally. There is some pretty poor compost (looks similar to very small wood chips mixed with ash) available from the municipality. None of our homemade compost is anywhere close to being ready, and we want to get the ball rolling with starting Jackfruit in air-prune pots.

[Fruit Jungle]

It probably fine, if it has chunky material just make sure it stays wet around the seed. Also, partially decomposed material will end up losing a lot of volume, so your 3 gallon tree will be more like 1 gallon after a year. That's maybe not a big deal if it's just short term.

[Finca La Isla]

We use it all the time. It’s mostly collected at the base of steep hills where it’s generally deepest. We mix that with generous amounts of cow manure and some well composted chicken manure along with coco fiber or rice hulls to make our medium.
We don’t use the uncomposted leaf litter.
We do use our own compost sometimes which takes us about 6 weeks to produce.
Peter

[elouicious]

i think it would work fine- maybe would benefit from the addition of an areated component (perlite, pumice, calcined clay, etc)