The soil experiment....

[thbjr]

I've been having the unfortunant same problems that FTDude92 is having in this thread. The plants do well, showing signs of recovery from shipping shock and even begin to grow. Then around the 4th or 5th week, begin to go downhill. Blackening traps and leafs and stop growing completely. While the condition seems to be temporary, it usually come out of it after 10-12 weeks, it's got me stumped as to why. So I took some young VFT's and planted some in pure peat, pure LFS, pure sand and pure perlite. The pure sand was the worst. It killed a very young (dime size) VFT within 48 hours, and when I removed the bigger (quarter size) plant, the rhyzome was turning black. I've since put those plants in with the LFS plants.
Has anyone else tried this?

 

[adymitruk]

I did a dry 50:50 sandeat mix. It was watered after I put the plant in. The plant had a short dormancy in march (I put it outside after it was under a lamp inside from dec when I rescued it from a store) but now is flowering and budded off about 5 plants. I must say though that sand is a horrible start for small vfts - even 50:50 sandeat. Pure peat would be better. It seems that the water drains too well, or something to that effect. Maybe if the pure sand planting that you did had a lot of water at the bottom so the roots could reach a source to drink from...

 

[adymitruk]

sand/peat mix.. the : p gets turned into smiley

 

[jimscott]

I have done the peat & sand mix with a layer of LFS on top. Next VFT's I get will go in pure LFS.

 

[*Barracuda_45*]

My CP media mix is 60% peat then the rest is chopped dry LFS/perlite/sand all mixed together, i put moistend dry LFS inside on the bottom of the pot just to cover the holes then the media in on top of that, works great for me..