Signet - The nitrogen replacement is in the fertilizer that I would be using anyway. The whole point of using the pine fines is to make rich, fluffy soil. I have sand and hardpan soil here. Probably the only thing it is good for is cactus. The pine fines used in a raised bed or even used to replace soil in a dug hole, creates food for earthworms & fungi and breaks down into good soil. I use additional pine fines and oak leaves as mulch all around my garden beds and I have notice a positive difference there, too!

Also, I completely stopped using commercial compost. I was losing many plants and the compost was the only thing different that I was doing. So I did some research and this is what I found:

Article about compost:
https://www.planetnatural.com/...

Now I try to make my own compost, but I don't currently have a big space to do that in and I have a lot of garden areas, so mulching with pine fines and fallen oak leaves (from my two trees) seems to be doing a great job!

I haven't stopped using commercial compost, but I do very carefully read the label for contents. (No sewage sludge for me, thank you! Nor will I use recycled-from-the-neighborhood stuff, because I know just what kind of pesticides/herbicides/fungicides junk people use in their yards.)

My preferred compost is mushroom compost, but that has become impossible to find (in bags). After that, redwood compost is good (but it is often sold out). One chain here used to carry a line of organic compost which was very good (made from "forest products") but for some obscure reason they recently stopped selling it. Now I am using an "organic garden compost" carried by a different nursery, which is made from things like composted/decomposed tomato skins (and I can't remember what-all, but I think it maybe had decomposed chicken manure in there too). So far, so good with that product.

I wouldn't mind having a compost heap (at our old house I used to have one of those plastic barrel things that you stepped on to turn the pile), but there is really no good place for it here. The property has a lot of shade, and apart from that, it is pretty much totally landscaped. I can find (or make) places to squeeze plants in, or stage some pots (on hardscape), but not an eyesore compost pile.

I can't find pine fines either. I searched because there was a thread on here time ago, but no luck for me.

signet said:Sooby , if you have to buy nitrogen to add to the soil to replace the nitrogen removed by the decomposing wood chips/fines ......what is the point ? I could see having the fines decomposing in a compost heap until ready to use but still makes no sense to me to have to spend money on the fines and then money on the nitrogen needed to add in to replace the nitrogen used by the decomposing fines . Why not just use compost ?

I do not use pine fines nor do I have any reason to, so I was just explaining how people get around the problem if it occurs. If one has to purchase compost does it work out cheaper than buying pine fines plus fertilizer? Compost doesn't necessarily have a lot of nitrogen, what there is tends to be slowly available, and if the carbon:nitrogen ratio of the compost is too high then compost can also cause nitrogen deficiency if incorporated.

Just out of curiosity after reading this thread about pine fines, do those who can't find any locally not have pine bark mulch for sale? As in you don't have any pine mulch products available at all?.........Maryl

Thanks, that was an interesting article Becky.

Just a question about dying: are you saying that some products have colouring added??

Maryl said:Just out of curiosity after reading this thread about pine fines, do those who can't find any locally not have pine bark mulch for sale? As in you don't have any pine mulch products available at all?.........Maryl

I haven't seen any locally here for a while, Maryl. I would have only been looking for shredded pine bark mulch. We used to be able to get it and I can't say I looked really hard but did check a few places that used to carry it when I used it before.

Yes Gleni, a lot of the mulches sold here are dyed. Red or black are common. The black seems oily.

Bringing in outside materials can be a real crap-shoot.

@gleni
Not only are some mulches dyed, There are now decorative landscape mulches which are made from shredded tires. This one really makes me wonder. Don't people realize that today's landscaping might be tomorrow's vegetable garden?

Whenever a society or an industry finds itself with a disposal problem, the solution seems to be to find a way to repackage and redistribute it, e.g. Milorganite.
When low and nonfat milk started to become popular, the byproduct was a huge surplus of milk fat, which led to a cheese boom. The government subsidized and stockpiled tons of it, to the point where it was finally forced into a nationwide cheese give-away program. Every processed food became cheese-flavored as well.

I know a lot of people swear by it, but coconut coir has caused me quite a few problems. In my experience, it has all of the water-retention of peat, with none of the anti-microbial properties. I think the massive push to popularize it as growing medium was the result of another disposal problem.

@polymerous
I've had "curious" results from the use of mushroom compost, ranging from rampant, water-resistant mycelial overgrowth in containers, to the decline and eventual death of potted plants. The latter problem, when I inquired at the soil yard, was supposedly due to the mushroom grower's use of chlorine bleach to sterilize the mushroom beds before use.

A few years back, OSH ran an irresistible special on their newly-introduced "house brand" potting soil. I tried a few bags, but everything I planted in that garbage quickly declined, including daylilies.

"Forest Products" is one of those "warm & fuzzy" terms, that, when used on soil labeling, can include things quite far-removed from the actual forest, such as construction waste, plywood, paint, and pressure-treated wood. I've seen all of these things in the recycling "mountain" at the local landfill. (An area pretty much off-limits to the general public.)

I once bought a couple of bags of generic planting mix from a big box store, and when I opened a bag, it reeked of the local landfill. The label had the terms, "regionally formulated" and "reclaimed forest products". Makes sense. With so many municipalities running yard waste composting programs, it would be crazy to ship bags of soil around the country when you can simply print up bags and ship them out to be filled at satellite locations.

Maryl, I can find pine bark mulch but not so easily. What I found is in very big pieces. I don't mulch for now, I wanted to try pine fines but since I can't find any I'll just skip mulching.
I did try pine bark but one cat that comes here at night thought it was litter and left too many of his smelling gifts. And, it's a lot of work too, to keep everything in place and neat. I have not too much to weed to, the soil is not so rich and weeds don't like it much for now. I also read that mulching provides nice places for slugs and I don't want more of them.

Ken, I agree for coconut coir. It's the worts medium I tried until now.

Thanks Sue and Ken. Well, I am a babe in the woods when It comes to commercial mulch and fertilisers. I will learn to read all the labels from now on and seek out further information. Fancy dying it!

Odd that you had trouble with mushroom compost, Ken, but then, I haven't been able to get any for several years, probably 10 or more.

Being unable to get mushroom or redwood compost, I most recently went with the "organic" "forest products" compost because of problems that I had with "organic garden compost" (or something like that) that I bought from a certain hardware chain here several years ago. (Probably that was locally recycled-and-bagged stuff.) The bag had more than a few not-organic things in it.. broken pieces of plastic (plant labels?), some metal hardware (screws, nuts), some pieces of what looked like painted lumber scraps, and a tampon. I was horrified. Never again. (Even without the obviously not-organic stuff, you have to be concerned about all of the fungicides/pesticides/herbicides that people use on their properties, that could wind up in the recycled yard waste stream.)

(Now you've got me bummed out and worrying about the "forest products" stuff, Ken... Thanks... )

As for Milorganite... no thanks. (I know that lots of people swear by it, partly for its supposed deer-repelling properties... but really, all sorts of c**p ends up in the sewage sludge, and I don't mean just the obvious. Think heavy metals, for starters...)

To any Ontario'ers out there ( Valerie maybe this will be of some interest to you) , I discovered a pine mulch today at a True Value farm supply store near me . They had lots of cedar , redwood mulches of course .......all dyed red or black or brown ( why would you want dyed mulch ?)however I discovered a particular bagged mulch product made from pine bark .

This was the only pine mulch there and it was a very finely shredded pine bark compared to a couple of others that were much larger chunks of bark . Bagged as an undyed mulch going by the name Alltreat Farms Canada Red Premium Pine Bark Mulch. It was selling for $4.50 a bag.

Based on what I have read here , I bought a bag to perform an experiment . I have a huge clump of one particular daylily here so I thought I would divide it up into 10 hunks and plant 5 in regular soil and 5 in a mix of regular soil and pine bark shreds and grow all in the same size pot with the same number of fans in the same location with the same measured water supply and see which 5 pots do better . It will take till next spring to see how much difference there is between the regular soil pots and the mulch mix pots of course but I really would like to see if there is vast difference in the end result.

So it is available out there, here in Ontario anyway.

It looks like Alltreat is based in SW Ontario so it may be easier to get it there than here in Eastern Ontario. Home Hardware lists it at $6+ a bag but says check store for availability. Tru Country and Garden lists it but doesn't say if it is available at our nearest store. I'm pretty sure I had checked the local Home Hardware. I'll maybe taken a look next year, I used undyed cedar for what I wanted to do this year (veggie garden path) but I'd prefer shredded pine bark for the dayliies.

What is your expected result from the experiment? Is the regular soil taken from the garden, or is it bagged potting mix? If the latter then I would expect the ones without the mulch to do better. If it is soil from the garden then I'm not sure because garden soil doesn't work well in pots.

Sooby , oops .......sorry it was at True Country and Garden that I found the finely shredded pine bark .....not True Value ....my apologies . we used to have a True Value store here too that went the way of the dodo bird and I am constantly calling one by the others name and vice versa. I wish companies would quit changing their names True Country and Garden here used to Country Depot so sometimes I call it that too. DuH!!!!! ..

I plan to use garden soil ( from my veggie garden which has been amended with compost over a number of years ) one set of 5 pots with garden soil and pine fines , one set of 5 pots without , 1gallon pots, set in the same sunny area , measured water. My expected result would simply be to see which plants do better and to see how the fines affect the plants in general . I won't use commercial potting soil as it is not something I would normally have here .

You can find pine fines almost anywhere here in SC.

Signet, do you normally grow potted plants in garden soil? Since it doesn't typically work well in pots then that adds another factor to the experiment. BTW I thouht you were using shredded pine bark mulch rather than pine fines? That also likely makes a difference.

I think many people, myself included, are totally confused by the word fines, when it comes to pine fines. Way back when, I was hoping that the mulch I had purchased was considered fines. There was a thread about this at the time, so I posted a picture. Turns out what I had wasn't even close! My mulch was much smaller than fines, and I didn't think it was actually that small. In my head, fines meant REALLY fine. Michele (Tink) posted a picture of the pine fines that she just had delivered, and that cleared up the confusion for me. I wish I knew where that thread was, because it was so helpful. If anyone has a picture of actual pine fines, it would be helpful for everyone to see exactly what it is!

When we bought our house three years ago, we realized that the mulch in the walkway around the house needed to be replaced. It was worn out, and some of it had composted at the bottom, and it was on top of plastic that needed to be replaced anyway. I dug it all out and moved it to the edge of our shop, making a narrow flower bed there. I started plants from seed indoors and later moved them there. This area is pretty much mulch with some composed mulch, on top of mostly gravel. I'm shocked at how well the plants did! They are massive! I've never had any plants grow that well in just soil, even if it is amended. The only thing different is that they are growing in mostly mulch. I'm very impressed!

@Natalie

Are you referring to this post? http://garden.org/thread/view_...