My personal preference is to avoid bagged peat or coir based soils altogether and go with an adjusted rendition of the Gritty or 511 Mixes, as described in Al's article on "Container Soils - Water Movement & Retention". I find that a more porous medium actually gives my plants' roots the proper environment to grow and remain healthy in, without perched water sitting anywhere, or soggy rootballs while the surface seems dry. The mediums i use are free-draining and give the plants what they need without remaining soggy for too long a period of time. Link - Container Soils Article It's definitely worth a read to find out what purposes plant roots serve, what actually happens under the soil surface, and to gain a little knowledge on the basic physics of how water moves through various materials within a confined space... and that's precisely what growing in a pot environment is... it's a confined space. Pots don't have the same army of living things that gardens do, continuously moving and aerating the soil, or the ability to avoid perched water tables. So, we have to control the elements that make up our potted plantings and keep them growing in a healthy manner. It's not the actual mix recipes that are important... it's an understanding of the concepts discussed in the article that are important. Once you understand the concept, you can adjust the ingredients you use, the ratios, etc... and make it fit your own individual growing environment... which will naturally differ from anyone else's. Happy Growing!

I guess it's all a matter of perspective. If the active harvesting of peat for horticultural purposes of the .02% of the total Canadian peat reserves causes greater environmental alarm and concern than than the 15% that has been lost to development through deforestation, urbanization, industrialization and agriculture, then something is radically wrong with the underlying logic. This will continue to be a debate that will have little resolution. Diehard environmentalists will continue to insist that horticultural peat is a non-renewable resource despite all evidence to the contrary. And while they consider this evidence faulty simply because it is produced by those involved in the peat industry - for scientific as well as commercial interests - does not negate the fact that those involved are the only ones bothered to complile and produce the statistics that represent this evidence -- all the rest is merely suppostion and innuendo repeated ad nauseum. One doesn't often hear from these same folks about their boycotting of Canadian lumber and agricultural products that have a much greater impact on the demise of peat bogs - they pick their arguments to suit their case, as do most of the vast uninformed and uneducated. It's still a matter of personal choice. If for whatever reason - based on ill-formed logic or otherwise - one chooses not to use peat, that's fine. But to lambaste those who do based on the faulty logic they advocate that the use of horticultural Canadian peat is somehow radically and irretrievably altering the environment is to ignore their own personal impact that has a far greater adverse affect.

The best medium to plant newly rooted figs in is one that provides the greatest amount of aeration and ensures that aeration for the expected interval between repots but is still something you can deal with as far as the intervals between watering. IOW, you'll get the best growth from a soil you need to water daily or even twice a day, but if that is too inconvenient, you'll need to adjust to something more tolerable. How much vitality you sacrifice for convenience depends almost entirely on how far you go in the other direction and how fast air returns to the soil after a thorough watering. E.g., if you were using a soil/plant combination that required daily watering and could magically change the soil to one that only required watering every two days, there would be some degree of sacrifice in potential growth and vitality. If though, you could magically change to a soil that required watering only every 5 days, there would be a considerable sacrifice in growth potential and vitality. Soils that remain waterlogged for extended periods kill roots, and the plant pays to regenerate those roots by spending energy it would normally have put toward increasing mass, more blooms or fruit, extending branches ...... You may be referring to something I wrote about roots: While fig cuttings may root readily in water, the roots produced this way are quite different from those produced in a solid, soil-like or highly aerated medium (perlite, screened Turface, very coarse sand, e.g.). Physiologically, you will find these roots to be much more brittle than normal roots due to a much higher % of aerenchyma (a tissue with a greater percentage of inter-cellular air spaces than normal parenchyma). If you want to eventually plant your rooted cuttings in soil, it is probably not best to root them in water because of the frequent difficulty in transplanting them to soil. The "water roots" often break during transplanting & those that don't break are very poor at water absorption and often die. The practical effect is nearly equivalent to starting the cutting process over again with a cutting having diminished energy reserves. If you do a side by side comparison of cuttings rooted in water & cuttings rooted in a solid well-aerated medium, the cuttings in a solid well-aerated medium will always (for an extremely high % of plants) have a leg up in development on those moved from water to a solid medium for the reasons outlined above. Al

Sphagnum peat, aka peat moss, is a common ingredient in many potting soils. Potting soils are really soil-less mixes of ingredients designed to accomodate the very specific needs of container grown plants. Peat moss tends to be very moisture retentive, generally of a very small particle size and quite acidic. For these reasons, it should be used sparingly in any potting/container mix. The primary concern of any potting mix is fast drainage and good aeration and too much peat in the mix compromises both of these issues. It is definitely NOT an ingredient I would include in a potting medium to be used for cacti or succulents. For the record, peat is the decomposed remains of various plant products - sedges, mosses (like sphagnum), reeds or assorted other bog loving plants. Sphagnum is a moss that is often used as a decorative item to top off planted containers or to line hanging baskets, etc. Sphagnum peat - or peat moss, as it is most commonly referred to - is the decomposed product, found widely in peat bogs in the upper northern hemisphere. Canada has the world's largest supply of sphagnum peat bogs.