Question: Charcoal in potting mix for neps

[sooxiwei]

Originally Posted by alpiner

All,
Thx for your responses.
From what I gathered, I'm planning to put ~2-3cm of crushed charcoal as bottom layer for airiness, mixture of perlite+sm in btw, and top 2-3cm pure sm. Maybe btw charcoal and perlite/sm, I'll add transition layer of charcoal/perlite/sm. Do you see any problem with this setup? If it's working, I'll adjust layer thickness for diff nep type, e.g. if swamp neps then thicker perlite+sm layer, HL then thicker charcoal layer.

I've tried this sort of potting layer, just that I replaced charcoal with Styrofoam pieces, so far, they grow quite slowly as compared to common mix

[edwardyeeks]

I never like using LFS as my media because I can't seem to get the watering timing right. It's a good media mix, alpiner but I personally prefer burnt earth.

Peat moss and burnt earth combine to create quite a good soil mix. The thing is that burnt earth retains water, loses water fairly quick too(so that your don't get waterlogged conditions) and also provides good aeration. Some growers grow in pure burnt earth, but I mix mine with peat moss because I think neps do prefer some acidic conditions and peat moss prevents burnt earth from clumping or becoming muddy(not sure about this, it's said on my peat moss bag that it prevents clay soil from lumping!). This mix also helps the roots of a nep establish more firmly, since burnt earth and peat doesn't leave alot of "gaps" in between the media. I want to put charcoal to increase aeration but only a small amount of charcoal.

LFS and burnt earth works well too, but be very careful about watering. And sooxiwei, the reason I use perlite is because I want to finish my bag of perlite I know how annoying it is .

Lastly, burnt earth is very cheap! Only RM1.50-2.00 per bag(bag size about a cooking oil bottle or maybe bigger).