cheap but effective seed starting medium?

[alivia]

I have a $30 gift card to Lowe's and I want to buy something to start my seeds with this year. I've not had a good place to start seeds in our old house but our new house has three wonderfully sunny, south-facing windows in which we're installing shelves top to bottom for plants. There is enough room for a hundred or more starts at a time, so I want to get a lot of seed starting mix. Usually, pre-mixed stuff is more expensive no matter what the item - here I don't know if that's the case as I've never priced pre-mixed starter. I'd be happy to mix my own if it would turn out cheaper or of better quality.

Any ideas or experience to lend? Thanks!

[lmonter]

I've had good luck mixing up my own seed-starting and potting mix with compost, peat moss and perlite.
Just add trowel-fulls to a Home Depot (or whatever) bucket, mix, add what I feel like it needs until it's the consistency I like, and voila. Plus it hasn't gotten as brick-like after a few weeks as, say, the Black Gold seed-starting mix that a lot of places carry. That gets annoying.

[Pepper44]

I buy a bag of good topsoil and then mix in some dirt from my chicken pen. It always works great!

(Where I live in Kentucky we have heavy clay dirt, so I have to mix topsoil in, otherwise I would just use dirt from the yard. I usually have to till in a bag of sand along with the compost for my garden at the beginning of the year because our clay is so hard and thick.)

[alivia]

For some reason, I never thought of using dirt from the chicken pen. Good idea. I like this - just buy topsoil & use what we have. But I'm thinking I should mix something in that makes it even more loose than regular topsoil? Hmmm...I could buy peat moss....or maybe I could use some of the sandy dirt down by our creek? But I wonder if I'd run the risk of introducing disease this way. Or worse yet, farm chemical runoff from the neighboring corn/soy fields. Yuck.