Medium for 4"pots and bigger.

[Gary S]

Andy,

In the other post where you have some pics of plugs, culls and seedlings in 4" pots on the bench, it looks like you use a fine pine bark as the medium or around 10mm or so.

Do you add anything else to the NZ bark to make up the mix or is it solely just bark all the way up to your gallon size pots and beyond. Obviously as the pot size goes up the bark size will also go up.

Most people I know add other material to the bark, keen to hear your thoughts.

Cheers

Gary..

[MrCym]

With Orchiata, you don't need to add anything. For the plugs into 4", the mix is two bags fine and one bag #5. For anything we finish in 5" pots it's 50:50, fine and #5 and for gallons, it is three bags #5 and one bag fine. For larger than gallons, we use 100% #5 which is a particle size about 1/2" diameter. We made available a Cym pot to Orchiata cut down to show the pot roots this past February in San Francisco. Full of live roots after two years in the pot! Hate all those additives, perlite can be toxic, charcoal binds salts so is useless with our water and the beauty of Orchiata is that it only needs a topdressing with gypsum to hold the pH right where we need it. Cannot be bothered washing coir until it is clean enough to plant in though when it is pre-washed by a reliable company, it grows well too.

[Gary S]

Thanks Andy, my thoughts also with good quality bark.

Gary..