Hey scbrooks, there is a seller I believe in the california area on ebay.com that sells both 5-1-1 gritty mix and 1-1-1 mix already made perfectly, give ebay.com a search for gritty mix, if you search "turface mvp" the seller should also pop up. Hope this helps.

Thanks for the info. I checked it out, that's up in the San Fran area... quite a ways away. Looks like they have 1-1-1 and 3-4-2 mixes, but they are also pretty darn expensive when you factor it all up.

I'm going to see if I can keep looking locally, and see if any others have some leads I can follow :)

I found a mini bark stuff which doesn't say what kinda bark it is... It's by Western Organics, and it's called "Garden Time" They just sell it as mini nugget bark.

Does anyone know anything about that?

Thanks!

The actual source of the bark is not as important as the size - pine bark is not uniformly available in all parts of the country so folks often need to make do :-)) If you check the Western Organics website, it does indicate that the bark nuggets are Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir. As long as the size is right, this will work great.

This one is close if you can find it locally. ~$4 per 2 cu. ft. bag.

You should screen out the larger pieces if you want it to be 'just right.'

Here is a link that might be useful: Earthgro Decorative Groundcover Bark

The ingredients for the mixes are expensive, so naturally they would be expensive to buy them premade and the shipping costs money. I got the ingredients on ebay, and it was a great mix, but if you had a lot of plants, it would add up to a lot of money.

I'm east coast, but had the same problem. Even the nursery "Pros" looked at me funny when I asked for pine bark fines. They never heard of it and had no idea where I could find it.

I went to where they had their bagged mulches and found pine bark mulch (not nuggets, or mini nuggets) that stated on the bag "Can be used as soil conditioner".
I bought a bag and found it to be 95% usable material!

I buy it from a place that will tell me they don't have it, when they do, because they don't have it by that exact name.
I think for anyone looking to find ingredients for 5-1-1 or Gritty Mix, would do better asking for "pine bark mulch that can be used as soil conditioner" rather than "Pine Fines"