4pc Soil Sieve Set, 12" diameter - Stainless Steel Frame Three Interchangeable Sieves With Varying Mesh Sizes Grade - Mix Soil Filter Large Debris Replacement Screens Available Great for Bonsai

This is the second time I've bought this. Both times it's been great. If your hobbies include any potted plants, bonsai, and the like, then this sieve will work great for you. It comes with three different size sieves that pop in and out of the main frame. They fit snuggly so if you're a bit older and have dome arthritis it might be difficult for you, but other than that this thing works wonders for making your potting soil homogeneous. I use the large one first to get all the big chunks out, that stuff I threw in a garden bed for maulch. Then I use the small one to separate the real fine dirt. In my household pots I use the medium sized dirt mixed with some perlite and vermiculite.

I use this to screen materials for container soils and soilless growing mixes. I like the size (diameter). I've screened about 60 pounds of calcined clay, 6 gallons of pumice, and 15 gallons of wood bark, so far. The only complaint I have is, my arms are sore. The mesh isn't perfectly consistent on the fine screen, but practically speaking, this isn't really an issue. The mesh varies, between 9 and 10 wires per inch. For my soilless and nearly soilless mixes, the idea is to avoid a perched water table in the pots. To test this, I drilled small drainage holes around and in the bottom of a clear plastic (PETE) round quart disposable food container, filled it with screened and rinsed material, watered well, and observed the water table thru the clear plastic side. The calcined clay barely held a water table, just above the top row of drainage holes. The pumice didn't show a perched water table. Ideally, for my purposes, 8 -9 wires per inch for potted mixes would be great, but this is close enough. Would love to see some replacement screens available, in more mesh sizes, but that's the only thing I would change. The basic product as offered is fine. As a system, I use a couple of Sterilite bins, to screen into. I use a 56 quart one on the bottom, and a 28 quart one on top. The top one is shallow, sitting crosswise, resting on the top of the taller bin, allowing space to dump useable product into the lower bin. Fines are sifted directly into the top bin. The top one can nest into the bottom between sessions, protecting the usable product. The diameter of the screen frame works really well with these bins, and you can work from a comfortable seating position. These screens are definitely worth buying.

First and foremost, lets get the bad news out of the way. This Stainless Steel sifter is not the most durable of sifters. When I had ordered it and taken it out of the box, I found it was rather flimsy. Whether this flimsiness is intentional or not, I can not say. I am almost inclined to believe it is not actually stainless steel, but some sort of tin product. That being said; I thoroughly love the product for what I bought it for. I've been using this Soil Sifting set for cockroaches, as disgusting as that sounds. When the cages need cleaning of debris, and other things I can't mention in polite company, I use this sifter to filter all the still live creatures from the trash that they've been hiding in. The interchangeability of all the filters is easy, just knock one out with your hand gently, and place another in the dish. The gaps in each sifting window are rather small, the largest of the windows is about a quarter of the nail on your pinkie finger. I would think you'd need something bigger than that for soil, but I'm no expert on how well it sifts that sort of thing. I thoroughly believe this particular sifter would work wonders on spot cleaning reptile cages that use sand as well as the cockroaches I use it for. The smallest screen would also work wonderfully for crickets and insects like those. This product works great for my very specific job I've used it for. The extra screens are great for the different sizes of the cockroaches, and I lose far less nymphs than with any other thing I've used for cleaning their cages. It's also a naturally slippery sifter that even the most curious of bug can't easily escape from during sifting. To sum up my Review, I do not use this for anything but cleaning insect cages. Your experience with anything but insects will vary, but if you buy this item for cockroaches and crickets, you'll find that it is one of the better sifters for the job.

I recently had 2 cubic yards of "engineered topsoil" delivered to my house. It's great stuff (80% compost, 20% sand and clay) but had a little too much bulk (pieces of wood, a few rocks, clumps of clay) for my liking. I had this sifter overnighted from Amazon (I'm impatient) and it worked perfectly for filtering out the bulk from the soil. The sifting was even fun! I originally hoped for something bigger but now that I've used it I think anything bigger would be too much of a back breaker. I attached an image to this product so you can see the before and after.