Skybound
Well-Known Member
Maybe next time take a wheel barrow down to the bog.
Making your own soilless mix aka Faux Mix
- Thread starter farside05
- Start date
I use the 1/3 rule
1/3 humus (say 20% ewc the rest our vermi-compost) can use bagged but look for best quality like BU Blend (west coast) or Coast of Main Lobster compost (east coast)
1/3 peat moss - I like the cheap Canadian stuff.
1/3 aeration - per-lite or what you like.
Amendments added to the above.
In Canada they started regulating the Peat industry. I think they saw what was happening in England/Scotland where they are using it for fuel to burn and heat stuff.
Peat moss is a non-renewable resource.
It take many many many years (100s -1000s) for the peat bogs to turn into peat moss (not sure where the term moss comes from).
Its a beautiful thing.
Peat Bogs = great place to go fishing. Supports a lot of wildlife. Good stuff.
Once its hydrated it's the opposite of what you get in a bale. It's actually promoted to help keep soil hydrated in dry conditions.
This is why the Pro-Mix is so expensive. Its geared toward a professional landscaper that opens the bail and uses it for top dress around flower beds.
Pro-Tip:
Peat Moss MUCH MUCH Better as a mulch than bark mulch which kills flowers and weeds.
Exactly why I use it in my planting bed, over the weed block!
"Weed block" - Is that another use for the Mexican weed we used to get with Paraquat on it? That wood actually work I'm thinking.
The bog here is really magical. Uphill from the ocean and beaches, bog is basically what I’ve got for landscape around me for an hours drive in most directions. It’s a lot of meadows of various sizes from tiny to huge, with strips and patches of gnarled forest in between. The forest is dark and mossy - not quite the swamps of Mordor but definitely getting close to the outskirts. The valleys have little slow moving rivers with jet black water from all the moss tannins, and all sorts of gnarled moss covered trees overhanging- it’s dark as hell and you have to watch out for patches of quicksand type muck that just looks like mossy ground till you go in up to your chest. I stepped off a log once onto what looked like solid ground and I think if my backpack hadn’t stopped me sinking further I would have been up to my neck. As it was I went right in and my pack rode up on my back choking me while I floundered around and grabbed the log I’d stepped off of. Most of it’s not that deep or soft- but walk all day and you’re going to find one of these little traps
The bog part is just Moss World. There’s no such thing as flat or solid ground- just uneven hummocks of all different kinds and colours of moss, with all sort of cool little bog plants and very stunted bonsai trees. In summer you can’t take a step without stepping on the sundews which are almost another carpet on top of the moss carpet. It’s a bit of sensory overload in some ways cause there are just so many colours and tiny little weird plants and lichen. The kind of place you can stare at from a few inches away or a mile away and both ways looks amazing. Fairlyland.
If I make a sunshine mix thread I’ll get some pics and link to this one.
Walking places is tiring because it’s so damn spongy. It’s like a gravitational pull forcing you to sit on the hummocks or lay down. Everything is soft. It’s also very quiet and everything looks kind of the same in a way, which makes it even weirder to walk through - cause you walk all day and feel like you didn’t get anywhere, and you always get wet, and there’s no sound except your feet squishing and whatever birds are around. I used to go on long treks, esp in my younger days. It’s a series of ocean fiords here with bog in between and one time twenty years ago I walked for four days to try to go to a beach- only to get turned around and come out almost exactly where I went in. I thought I was arriving on the beach where I wanted to be - till the last ten minutes. It was really weird in there.
No fishing in the bog here though. The ice ages left a sort of hardpan about 4’ down, which traps the water and forms the base for the bog. So it’s hills and valleys of that hardpan stuff everywhere with a layer of water and moss on top. Lakes and ponds of all sizes in the valleys, on the sides of the hills, and on top of the hills. Sort of uniformly wet. The lakes are almost all shallow and the only fish in them are tiny stickleback.
Hardly anyone living around here and I don’t know of anyone digging peat other than maybe the occasional person like me once in a blue moon. So it’s renewable enough for my purposes and hopefully stays that way.
In some ways the bog is a bit like a living organism because it’s so acidic- it kills or stunts the larger bushes and trees around its edges over time and slowly grows and takes over where it can. Under the top layer below the plant roots and whatever critters are making a living, is sort of an acidic soup. No air, never dries out and not much happens down there as far as I can see, so it’s a kind of cryogenics.
Thousands of bodies have been found in European bogs and lots of them are preserved incredibly well. Bog body - Wikipedia
Another weird and interesting preserved food is ‘bog butter’. Bog butter - Wikipedia
Skybound
Well-Known Member
You're a good read Weas! Your sentences flow well and are not overfilled with cascading adjectives. If I had to guess, I'd say you were an author somewhere in your years.
Thanks. Just :stoned I guess ha ha. Figured I’d wax poetic about the bog a little. Someone might be interested to hear a bit about the origins of the stuff that comes out of the bale.
Skybound
Well-Known Member
I read/saw/heard/IDK that harvesting the peat bogs are actually harmful to the earth due to dislodging CO2 and methane pockets etc and as a result, Canada closely monitors and/or controls how much is, or can be extracted per unit of time. I suspect this could be true or applied to anything we humans dig up. I would think it would be a good thing to spread Earth's goodness all over the Earth. Like if we could adopt farming practices that aimed to fertilize the whole crust of the earth so vegetative plants can grow in more places and sustain more humans and animals. If there were more plants, they could scrub more air of carbon.
Good ideas but as a species, at least when we are acting in large herds, we are way too shortsighted and greedy. I’m sure they’d be strip mining the fuck out of this place again if shipping costs weren’t so high.
I don’t want to get into a rant on Farsides’s thread which I am already polluting with my blather
I don’t want to get into a rant on Farsides’s thread which I am already polluting with my blather
Lovely blather it is WC! Nicely written.
Also most of the bogs in Canada are on Crown land (government property). You just cant go digging stuff up without permission, eh?
On the conservation theme, Peat from bogs are much better at producing heat that growing corn and burning it. Weed have burnt every peat bog in the USA if we had any. Sadly.
Canada decided to work on burning oil sands instead. Prolly wasn't the best choice short term and actually threw the country into a recession thanks likely to a corporation or 3 that just lowered the price of gas at the pump, wait, then raise the prices back up later.
History is a beautiful teacher. Too bad we hoo-mans have such short term memories. Hey doesn't weed affect .... what was I saying? lol
Skybound
Well-Known Member
I think I made a boo boo. Serves me right for not thinking while high but I just mixed all of everything together, so 3cu ft peat, 2 cu ft perlite and all of the Espoma Garden Lime. IDK why I had it in my head that the container sizes was the dose of each. Does anyone think this will be too hot or something? I plan to use more Faux Mix, so if possible, I can get new materials, mix those correctly, or even with less or no lime, then mix the 2 Faux Mixes together to even out the overdose of Lime I now have mixed.
- Thread starter
- #33
I think I made a boo boo. Serves me right for not thinking while high but I just mixed all of everything together, so 3cu ft peat, 2 cu ft perlite and all of the Espoma Garden Lime. IDK why I had it in my head that the container sizes was the dose of each. Does anyone think this will be too hot or something? I plan to use more Faux Mix, so if possible, I can get new materials, mix those correctly, or even with less or no lime, then mix the 2 Faux Mixes together to even out the overdose of Lime I now have mixed.
I can't say what, if anything, it will do. Looking at what I have left over, I'd say 3cf Peat, to 2cf Perlite, to half a bag of Lime is roughly the ratio. So if you threw in another bale of Peat, another bag of Perlite, skipped the Lime, and mixed the two batches together, you'd be pretty close.
Skybound
Well-Known Member
You're a life saver, thank you Farside!!!
Never thought of the 'hardpan' aspect of life in your swamps. The glaciers scraped it clean and the moss moved in. Crazy.
My swamps are deep man... you gotta drive piling in for days before you build... months if it's a multi story building. Down here, you never hit solid ground with the pilings.... they just get to a point where all the friction locks them in place. The river did the land clearing around here and she doesn't scrape the land nearly as harshly.
Always. Be sure to read the bear story if you missed it. Friggin awesome.
So.... not here to banter about moss with old friends... tho a true gentleman would never let such opportunities pass un-exercised.
I've been growing in pure perlite hempy pots forever and 2 days. I upsized my world and don't like the result of my perlite-snow world. Mixed up some peat moss (myc's included) and some perlite. Tossed in the suggested amount of garden lime. I'm going to create a knockoff OctoPot with engine oil collection pans, SmartPots (fabric bags), and net cups.
I'm currently planning to use MegaCrop for the nutrient source.
Any words of wisdom @farside05 ?
Skybound
Well-Known Member
I'm going a similar route except I mixed my Faux mix first and will let it set for a few days, then I'll mix in the EWC and some other amendments in a few days. FWIW, after more reading, I learned that Garden lime is just calcium carbonate, and since I was planning to add more, I'll just modify my dose, or maybe not add any more at all, still more reading to be sure, but I'm fairly confident it'll be cool. FYI, they got a great deal on the Zon for EWC @$27 for 30LBS.
- Thread starter
- #37
Mega Crop works great with peat based soil-less mixes. My feed schedule is HERE. I use Cal Mag and Pro Tekt in addition but they aren't necessary. @InTheShed uses just the Mega Crop and his plants are doing equally well. To me the combo of peat based soil-less and Mega Crop is about as easy as it gets, and it's economical too. Not a whole bunch of bottles and mixing nutes like the 7 product nute lines.
So, in a Mega Crop nute regime, . Do you think its necessary to add the lime to the ammendment if ones tap water ph's around the high 7s or 8?
Skybound
Well-Known Member
I would assume yes as the media will definitely out buffer the nutrients.
Buffering your medium is key to building a quality substrate. Otherwise you might as well go with coco.