Hello all,

I have many large potted plants which are too big to lift by myself, so dropping them in a bucket of water to try to fix hydrophobic soil is not an option.

I bought agar agar powder to make my own wetting agent, but all the instructions I can find online are not helpful. Most say add boiling water to agar powder and mix until you get a wall paper paste type consistency. They don’t say how much water or agar powder to use. Then they say add 250ml of this mix to 9 liters of water..... So I tried this today.

To get the wallpaper paste consistency I ended up using about 2 tablespoons of agar powder with 500 ml of water. I boiled this while stirring and then let cool slightly. I put 200ml of this hot mixture into a large 8L watering can of cold water and mixed well. This resulted in lots of large strands of clear, quite firm jelly floating in water. The jelly would not dissolve in the water at all, but just float in it. It blocked the watering can nozzle, so i removed that and poured a little on a few plants. This doesn’t seem to work as the gel and water are separated and the gel sits in bits on top of the soil rather than soak in. Please can someone tell me what I am doing wrong? Thanks so much!