{"id":915,"date":"2011-01-25T21:19:44","date_gmt":"2011-01-26T05:19:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thepitcherplantproject.com\/blog\/?p=915"},"modified":"2011-01-25T21:19:44","modified_gmt":"2011-01-26T05:19:44","slug":"the-mix-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thepitcherplantproject.com\/archive\/2011\/01\/the-mix-up\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mix Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last weekend I finally had some time to mix things up.\u00a0 Now, I am a believer in keeping things simple — such as my media.\u00a0\u00a0 I know that for whatever reason, media can be a hotly debated subject in some carni-circles. All I can say is — do whatever works for you. Seriously.<\/p>\n

I have grown plants successfully in nothing but pure peat moss. And it’s good and great!\u00a0\u00a0 My FAVORITE brand is Sunshine peat moss.\u00a0 Great stuff. I’ve used other brands of peat in the past and it was all effed up.\u00a0 Weeds, twigs, dead bugs, dried leaves, and other schtuff was just hanging out in the moss. Oh… and one time, there was one brand where mold was a problem! Seriously! I bought a bag and there was all this fuzzy stuff growing in the bag! Nasty. So right now, I favor Sunshine. But again, use whatever work works for you. Don’t be afraid to try things out.\u00a0 Just be sure it’s not that MiracleGrow brand or any other brand that has fertilizer in it.\u00a0 Well… you can try it out and tell me how your plants fare.<\/p>\n

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Like I said, I’ve grown plants successfully in pure peat.\u00a0 However, I needed to make the peat stretch, so added a few things.<\/p>\n

This year, I am using sand in my mix.<\/p>\n

Now, I don’t know if the below brand of sand is really any good, but my test plants have had no horrific results.\u00a0 I picked this up from (ugh, sad to say… the Depot…) I typically like to go to the quarry and use Oly Sand, (Oly for Olympia, Washington State, I guess…) and that has worked fine for me last year.\u00a0 We’ll see how the plants fare this year with this new stuff.\u00a0 If they all crash and burn and die… then… I’ll blog about it, cry for a while,\u00a0 and then warn you NEVER to use this brand!<\/p>\n

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Perlite.\u00a0\u00a0 It adds a nice airyness to the mix. The general CP go-to-catchall mix is 1 part peat to 1 part perlite.\u00a0 Now, I do have to warn you NOT to breath any of this dust in. Don’t eat it either. I know some folk may be tempted.\u00a0 If you use this stuff, please wear a mask. Or moisten the contents of\u00a0 bag. Do not get it in your lungs, because it can cause weird things to happen to you. Seriously. \u00a0 I do wear a dust mask, and also — if you moisten the contents of the bag, it really minimizes the dust from flying all over the place.<\/p>\n

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So… on to the mix.<\/p>\n

I dump the sand in my handy dandy wheelbarrow. I then wash the sand several times over removing some sediment and residue so that it’s cleaner.<\/p>\n

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Washing sand!<\/p>\n

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Next thing, below, I dump the moist perlite. This mix is roughly 1:1:2, sand, perlite, peat.\u00a0 A few more additives in there to stretch my media…<\/p>\n

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Then, I toss in the peat.\u00a0 Yes, I know it’s chunky and a block of hardened stuff in the photo below. The fun part is getting in there and mixing it all up. I get in there with my garden gloves and mash it all up. The sand will actually help break it down so much faster.<\/p>\n

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\n… and a few minutes later, a mix ready to fill those pots<\/a>.\u00a0 I actually went through this wheelbarrow of media very quickly… ah, so much to do. So little time.<\/p>\n

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Another good friend of mine (Hi Mama Lo!) uses a concrete mixer to mix her media in. I should really invest in one…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last weekend I finally had some time to mix things up.\u00a0 Now, I am a believer in keeping things simple — such as my media.\u00a0\u00a0 I know that for whatever reason, media can be a hotly debated subject in some … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[23,221,220,222,223,224,130],"class_list":["post-915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-how-to-2","tag-carnivorous-plant","tag-media","tag-mix","tag-peat","tag-perlite","tag-sand","tag-sarracenia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thepitcherplantproject.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thepitcherplantproject.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thepitcherplantproject.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thepitcherplantproject.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thepitcherplantproject.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/thepitcherplantproject.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thepitcherplantproject.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thepitcherplantproject.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thepitcherplantproject.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}