Soil

Reply to: "The soil is still very moist. It's probably better if I wait to flush and fertilize until the plant needs a watering right?" Yes, that would be best. I thought my mix was chunky, but I see now that I could lift my chunkiness game to the next level! When considering the physical properties of a container medium, there is something called the threshold ratio. In your mind's eye, imagine you have a quart jar half full of marbles, and you can 'see' all those nice/large air spaces between the marbles. Now mix a pint of sand to the marbles which is more than enough to fill all the air spaces between the marbles. So, what will the roots be growing in? Sand. Even with the large particles mixed in. Now start removing sand. When there is exactly enough sand to fill all the spaces between the marbles, you're at the threshold ratio between marbles and sand. So, aeration doesn't occur until there is not enough sand to fill all the spaces between the marbles. If you start with a jar of sand and start mixing marbles into it - nothing happens in terms of aeration until you add a large enough marbles that the volume of sand in the jar is insufficient to fill the air spaces between the marbles. You really can't start with a poor medium and amend it with chunky material. Well, you can, but the fraction of chunky material needs to be somewhere in the 75-90% range to get the most from the increase in aeration. We don't say we added coffee to our sugar or cookie dough to our chocolate chips, so we really didn't amend the poor medium by adding 5 parts of pine bark and 1 part perlite to it, since the pine bark + perlite would = about 86% of the mix. Not sure if you're interested, but this link leads to all you need to know about How Water Behaves in Container Media. Al

Q