It has a lot of pine fines. It is forest compost. That is the first on the list, so yes it is bark based I would say. It has a lot of fine material and would not fit the bill of the 511. It has a good quality texure right out of the bag. It holds water very long. One week in a 4 inch pot in a cool area with no sun. I have some house plants in it, but I use the 511 for cacti and palms. It is so odd, I have never seen such fast growth from any of my cacti before planting them in the 511. Same with even some other house plants, but then they get this splitting and then the splits brown. They grow really really fast, but just with this odd splitting, and holes in the leaves that are perfectly lined up. It has to be my fertilizing, or lack. Like I said, my cacti I feed with no issues and they are growing fast! So it is very odd.

My "Hyponex Experiment" originally posted on my blog. Recently, on a GardenWeb forum, there was a discussion regarding Hyponex Potting Soil. I think it's crap mainly because it has sand in it & clumps together too much, not allowing drainage. Well, I bought one of the $1 bags of it at a local grocery store. It's about 2/3 of a cubic foot. Anyways, I have a few pepper plants that need to be potted up. I decided, since I have some spares of them, to use one for an experiment with the Hyponex. It's a Jalapeno Early Organic plant. I filled the bucket with 100% Hyponex (no other additives, soil mixes, compost, peat, etc.). I figure also, if anything can survive being in just this soil, a pepper plant would be one of those. I did give it a shot of water-based MG fertilizer to help things a bit. I would normally do this right after transplant into what I consider a known good soil though. So, the MG doesn't affect this experiment any. The main goal is to see if the plant even survives. If it does, i'll compare it to one of my other Jalapeno Early plants to see how different fruit production, growth, etc. is from this one. Wish me luck! I'll update this experiment weekly, or sooner if anything changes (plant dies, etc.). Below are two pictures I took of the plant right after transplanting into the bucket. Peace - Steve

thanks

Susan, I was afraid maybe Horn's was your source, but Gene has listed some other local retailers who carry it, so hopefully y'all can still find it at a reasonable price even after the loss of Horn's. Patty, I am sorry you went through that. Legionaire's Disease. Yikes! I think your hunch that it might have come from the potting soil is a good one. You're a true survivor in more ways than one. Thankfully, our bodies can recover from such things with the help of medical science. Carol, I'm lucky, too, to have an endless source of leaves in the fall. If I am diligent and rake and collect them, that is....lol Some years I do a better job of collecting them from the woodland than others, but I do take care not to repeatedly take them all from the woodland and not to take them from the same area every year since they are important to the health of the woodland soil too. I do rake up and use all the ones that fall in the actual yard, and since the woodland creeps closer to my garden every year, some of the taller trees now drop their leaves into the garden, but I still have to rake them and chop them up. If I could get Pro-Mix without driving 100 or 120 miles to find it, I'd use it. This year I bought MG Moisture Control in February, March and April to add to all my containers because I feared a summer drought, and I am glad I did. As I fill up more containers for the greenhouse for this winter, I think I'm just going to make a version of Al's 5-1-1 mix. Gene, I agree that with any form of soil-less mix or other soil amendments, you get what you pay for and I absolutely will not cut corners in this area. I'd rather cut corners some other way. In gardening, I think the quality of the soil is the overall determining factor in a person's success. Everything starts with the soil. My dad used to say you shouldn't plant a $10 tree in a $5 hole, and that sums up how I feel about using cheap soil-less mixes too. Bon, Bio-solids have been sold as fertilizer or as a soil amendment since at least the 1960s as far as I know, and I've always gone out of my way to avoid the stuff to the extent that we can. One of my favorite garden supply sources in Fort Worth always carried Sul-po-Mag and I always cringed when I walked by that product, knowing where it came from. Some commercial vermicomposting facilities use bio-solids and others feed their worms pig manure (and probably other manures as well) so I won't purchase bagged worm castings unless I am sure of how a given company produces theirs. I just try to feed the earthworms in the ground here really well so they'll strew their castings everywhere as they tunnel through the soil. Our earthworm population has increased a huge amount since we moved here and began improving the soil, and I am so glad it has. My preference is always going to be for amendments from something right here on our property as much as possible because at least then I know the source and I know what is in it. We had rabbits in our early years here. Not because we purchased rabbits, but because after we moved "to the country", everyone we knew in the city who had a cat, dog or rabbit they didn't want any more and thought we should take it off their hands, and we did, because we didn't think any animal should live where it wasn't wanted. I'll qualify that by saying one family had a dog they truly loved, but had a small yard and thought she'd be happier here with us. We agreed and they sent her here to live with us, which I thought was a true act of love on their part. It was not that they didn't want her, but rather they loved her enough to put her happiness ahead of their own. She lived to be 18 years old and was a happy country dog who took great delight in roaming our pasture and woodlands. As long as she lived, she kept the squirrels away from the garden and yard. I found rabbits difficult to keep alive in the extreme heat that often plagues us here. Also, our rabbits really watched the wild rabbits roam free and resented being keep in a coop. We built them a fenced run that they loved because it was a more natural setting for them, but they occasionally escaped from it. After they eventually died, we did not get more rabbits. I've spent two consecutive very long very hot summers with cats and dogs cooped up indoors trying to stay cool and I'm just not ever going to bring chickens or rabbits inside in extreme heat. There's a limit to how many animals I can bring indoors before the house becomes more of a barn than a house! It is nice to be able to send them outdoors on a day like today and know they'll be happy outside all day and won't be roasting in the heat. I hope the heat doesn't return and that our animals can get used to being outside all day again. Dawn