signet said:I use coconut coir to plant my seeds in . no muss no fuss nothing organic to mold or grow fungus in or whatever those slimy flowery shaped things were in your dirt ( some kind of mold I am assuming) . I get no fungus gnats (I used to lose a lot of plants to these little critters) or white fly or anything else . Plants grow spectacularly well in this stuff. It is nice and light ( friable) so roots dont have to strain to grow. I love the stuff. Only requirement is to keep it watered as you would any other seedling starter.
I've used coir before, and it's generally good, but there are issues. Some of it can be high in salts, some of it is milled too finely and will pack down with watering. It's not a composted/aged product, but it's definitely organic. Based on prior experience with coir in my cactus/succulent and South African winter-growing bulb soil blends, the way I think of coir is that it has all of the water-holding capacity of peat, but with none of the antimicrobial properties.
Back to the present and daylilies. The product I used was General Hydroponics CoCoTek PX, which is coir pre-mixed with perlite, and I added a little more perlite when I used it for seeds. I also potted up a few new daylilies, using the CoCoTek PX straight out of the bag. After a few weeks I noticed that the daylilies were recovering, but growing slowly and with 'thin' new foliage. They were in full sun, and I was feeding them with a complete liquid fertilizer with minors, like I treat all new daylilies. The people at the indoor gardening store where I bought the coir said that because coir is strictly fiber, it has no nutrients, and the plants were probably suffering from a calcium deficiency. They sold me a Cal-Mag supplement designed specifically for use with coir 'soils', and that took care of the problem. I started using Cal-Mag on everything, (except carnivorous plants, which generally don't like calcium) because it seems to give the plants a boost. I figure that this is probably because a lot of my container plants are overdue for repotting, and have used up all of the lime in their soil.
Fungus gnats will infest coir pots, but coir doesn't come pre-packaged with eggs and larvae like most potting soils do.
Potting soils are mostly junk these days, since every municipal waste disposal site has a composting setup. Whereas potting soils of the past were made from ground bark, sand, peat and perlite, now they're generally made from pallets, scrap wood, tree trimmings and general yard waste. Ground up wood is probably the worst thing you could try to grow a plant in. If kept wet, it decomposes quickly to muck, and if kept on the dry side, it can develop rampant mycelium growth to the point where the entire soil mass becomes waterproof. Bark is much more resistant to breakdown.
I've settled on an outstanding, if unconventional, soil mix for my containers;
5 parts 1/4" fir bark
1 part perlite
1 part quality potting soil
Dolomitic lime
Regular feeding with Dyna-Gro Foliage-Pro (9-3-6)
Foliage-Pro has a full range of trace elements, plus calcium.
I first discovered this formula and method on another gardening site.
Search the Internet for "5-1-1" soil mix for more in-depth info and discussion.
