Perlite? Where to Buy

[Luke Skywalker]

I can, from personal experience, say that mixing perlite and soil at about a 30/70 to 50/50 mix perlite/soil is fantastic! It improves aeration and drainage, pulls the mix closer to neutral ph and doesn't decompose for about 3 years or so! (sometimes longer)

But, when comparing perlite on it's own as a hydroponic media compared to a perlite/soil mix, the pure coarse perlite wins hands down. Great aeration, just the right amount of capilliary action and MJ just loves it. Some say that adding vermiculite to the mix can improve it, but I found it held too much water, and the vermiculite broke down very quickly to become a blocking sludge in my pots. This stuff takes forever to wash out if you want to re-use the perlite.

 

Anyway, if you want to find some, (and I thouroughly recommend you do... ) go to your nearby hydroponics stores if you live in a capital city, shouldn't be too hard to find them these days, and look at the various brands of perlite each store may have. Look around too, because there is more than one type, but the best comes in a big yellow bag and goes by the name "Premium Perlite", made by Waterworld Wholesale. See if your hydro shop has this particular one, as it's the coarsest, least powdery and all around best brand of perlite I've found. I grow many, many types of plants, from vegies to herbs, mj orchids with this stuff and I heartily recommend it to you.

 

I hope this helps mate, go out and get some and grow yourself some Mary Jane! Good luck!

[Guest Field_of_Light]

Man must be the lateness of the hour...for some reason my brain seemed to think you were enquiring about adding perlite and then putting soil on top.....rather than mixing it.......

 

When I have used my leftover perlite on my garden rather than wasting it......

 

 

yes use it.....but make sure its sterilised soil....

 

perlite is sterile...I think thats where I was headed with my previous posts

 

Luke S is right.......

 

Sheesh gotta get some sleep......

[sols]

g'day; any good nursery will sell perlite/vermiculite premixed in 100ltr bags, cost around $40 - $50.

you can add it to soil (i not done so before),i use perl/verm instead of soil, feed plants daily with 'Canna' nutrients.

avoid buying perl/verm in smaller quantity than 100ltr.(too expensive).

[white_cluster]

Hey kids,

 

Yeah Perlite and soil go together, The perlite brand is Ausperl, for the cheap stuff, its $$$ at gardening stores cheap at hydro stores.

 

Anyway, my soil mix is about 2/1 soil/ perlite, I just make up my mix as I go along, and definately haven't got a recipe down pat yet, but worked a few things out about indoor soil growth. Not much, but I know now not to use cow-shit in your soil or mushroom compost, I stick to blood & bone, and castings from my worm farm and compost from my compost heap, and no don't sterilise your soil, it will breakdown all the goodness.

I don't have that much experience with soil indoors, I find it quite hard. It would be easy to grow with Canna Nutes like Sols says but it defeats the purpose of using soil, Soil crops should be 100% organic otherwise you'll get better results using hydroponics. Like I said I'm newish to organics, and so far, I can't reccomend it to anyway, I have never noticed the buds being tastier in organics, all i've noticed is yields are way down, but I've never used good Organic Hydro fertilizers because i didn't know they existed, but next crop I will test them out.

 

oh and I think the best brand of soil on the market is the Hortico brand shit, all the other shit is just woodchips, but you pay for its quality.

It comes in a green bag. Another good thing to try is lucerne meal from a rural store, my farmer neighbour gave me some for my tomatoes and told me to make a tea and spray em.

Anyway, seemed to work good on my pot too, but my tomatoes we're crazy this year.

[chunky]

It's extremely commonplace to mix it to soil for better drainiage and greater O2 levels in the root zone as well as better insulated roots.