Did a little research to see if I could figure out what it's physical shape/size/properties are with no luck. Best I can determine is, it 'appears' to be a sand-like product, which would make it inappropriate as a part of any gritty mix, which is screened specifically to remove all fine materials in order to avoid a perched water table. If the "gritty mix" you make supports perched water, the primary reason to make it has been nullified, so you might as well be using something like the 5:1:1 mix - easier and less expensive to make. What the product provides nutritionally is inconsequential; this, because a product like Foliage-Pro 9-3-6 has everything required for normal growth in one package and works better when used exclusively than it does when combined with other ingredients that might be mistaken as advantageous used in addition to a FP regimen.

If I'm wrong about the product's physical characteristics, please provide an image of the product on a sheet of paper or a paper plate with something in the image to help with size perspective.

Al

Rennezoe, I'm always intrigued by new soil ingredients, but I don't think I would use this one. It says right on the bag it may raise pH. Reading some of the reviews on Amazon, one said "the grains are at least 3 mm each", which sounds good, but another said it had a very high percentage fine silt included, up to 25%, which is not good unless you are using small quantities as a mineral rock dust additive. You can only add a very limited amount of rock dust (for drainage reasons), so you need it to be the best quality you can, and the calcium:magnesium ratio is way off for something that seems semi-reactive to me, unless you happened to know from testing that your soil mix was hugely deficient in magnesium.

If you really want a substitute for perlite, consider pumice. It's almost as good at helping drainage as perlite, it's pH neutral, and has the added bonus of not floating up in the soil. I will often cut the perlite in half with pumice. The mixture works well.

It is definitely more like perlite than sand. I was thinking of it as a replacement for perlite mostly for aesthetic reasons. I do use the foliage pro at half strength with the liquidirt because I got a free sample, but I don't notice any difference so intend to continue with the foliage pro alone. This photo is perlite, flora max and a handful of the mix I made based on your recipe. It's been a couple years and i honestly can't remember if this is gritty of 511, I'll have to go back and look. As a side note... My plants that are in this mix are doing amazingly well! It just took a lot of effort, time and money to locate the ingredients and I didn't write down what I ended up using as substitues! I should know better...

Ahhh... I filled a glass with this and tap water, ph 7.0 about 3 hours ago and it's already 8.4! The Petco guy went on and on about how ph neutral it was and I assumed fish would be even more sensitive than plants but I know nothing about aquariums. I do know that is a significant jump in ph...bummer.