Miles' To Go Fall plant list out!

[Thord Hakansson]

Hi George ! that seems to be quite a lot of coir! Since it holds water for a looong time you should be very careful with your watering regime.If you can´t get pumice perhaps you can get som cat litter? It must be the pink variant (danish moler) otherwise it will disintegrate and make the substrate hard as cement! I for one never use more than around 10% of coir in my substrate,other ingridients being pumice and cat litter in equal parts. This has served me well for the last ten years.

[graffiti]

Recently I decided soiless was really the way to go. I have been doing straight 50-50 pearlite to coir. Would like to use pumice but I can't get it around here. So far the plants seem to like it. They certainly grow fine with it. I am doing a long term comparison. My cactus blend or soiless, I will be observing the grown between two cacti hopefully in a year or two I can have some decent results.

It sounds to me like you need to go full on mineral. Maybe the humidity in GA isn't letting them dry out enough. I know in New England I do like 95% NAPA 8822 and like 5% compost because I know that the weather here won't dry out any soil other than that fast enough to keep rot at bay.

[george76904]

Its not that my usual cactus soil was doing anything wrong it was working fine, but I was was experimenting. I decided to try something different. The mix becomes bone dry in a couple days even in the extremely humid conditions.