Hello all,

I originally posted this in the generic container gardening forum but I thought that I might get more responses here since my question mainly pertains to mosses.

I've been lurking around on these forums for a while now and have learned a ton. I've bought the materials for the 5-1-1 and gritty mix and can't wait to get my plants in some new soil.

So regarding my current issue. I really like ferns and I've been trying unsuccesfully to grown different types of mosses around my ferns. The moss survives, but it never ¨takes¨ by attaching itself to the substrate and beginning to grow. It just sort of hangs on but the tips slowly brown until the point that the moss dies. I'm sure it is not a moisture problem as I've been very dilligent in keeping the moss wet (at one point I was heavily misting them twice a day). We also have a fairly humid client and don't have heating or ac so the air inside stays fairly moist.

I've slowly come to the conclusion that my tap water is the culprit for the mosses woes. I finally got all of the chemical information from our tap water supplier today, so I'm wondering if someone more knowledgeable than I could sift through these numbers and tell me what is killing the moss.. Once we have that determined, I'd love to hear possible solutions. On a related note, the water seems to be very hard and full of calcium and calcium carbonate and these calcium deposits have already started building up considerable scale on my terra cotta pots (mainly around the rims). Is that going to be an issue? I am fairly careful to flush my containers with 20-30% extra water (percentage based off volume of the container), which should be flushing the excess salts out of the soil, but it doesn't seem to prevent buildup on the pot itself.

Without further ado, I'm attaching two screenshots of my tap water's chemical makeup. In case you are wondering, the language if Catalan. The column titled ¨resultat¨ means result, and the ¨limit¨ column is the legal limit established for every line item. Most of the chemical names should be farely straightforward and the element abbreviations are next to the mg/l measurements.

It seems like there is no column summing Total Dissolved Solids. Without being sure exactly how to calculate TDS (I summed all of the metals, bicarbonates, chlorine, and sulfates) I arrived at a figure around 930 mg/l or ppm.

To my untrained eye, the biggest problem seems to be the 153 mg/l of Chloride (same as ppm I believe) and the 90 mg/l of Sodium. However, I know very little about what proportions of these elements are dangerous to plants, especially moss. The biggest problem could be the 200 mg/l of dissolved bicarbonates, for all I know.

Thanks in advance to anyone who helps shed light on all of this!

Peace,

Brent