Use small bags of the crumbled moss as soil-free seed starter. Place the moss in a small container, dampen and place the seeds within. The moss helps keep them warm and moist enough, but not too moist, as they prepare to germinate. Use the moss for growing orchids as well.
Sphagnum Moss Classic Grade New Zealand 3kg (240 Litre)
$159.00 Inc
Sphagnum moss grows in damp areas with high soil acidity. It grows in clumps, which can spread over a large area. Gardeners usually know about sphagnum moss and its many uses. Its ability to absorb and retain water and its ability to insulate naturally provides many applications for plant care. However, this moss’s value, historically and in modern times, also extends beyond the garden.
Related product is Peat Moss. Buy Peat Moss in Bulk Online on the Gold Coast
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Sphagnum Moss
Sphagnum Moss Classic Grade 3kg (240 Litre)
New Zealand Sphagnum moss is recognised worldwide as a premium product in the orchid growing industry. It is renowned for being long lasting in the pot and having an excellent water holding capacity.
Besgrow Sphagnum Moss is hand-picked, naturally air dried, and cleaned through a series of both mechanical and manual techniques to ensure a maximum Water Holding Capacity (WHC) of 96%. This allows the moss to retain water and nutrients for easy release to the plant without accumulating unwanted salts.
Long-established quality control procedures have been put in place to ensure you are provided with only the highest quality sphagnum moss products, . Throughout production Sphagnum moss is monitored to ensure the product meets high quality standards.
Sphagnum Moss (Classic Grade)
Commercial grade, S. cristatum; easy for root wrapping with length of 300mm+. Light browns, creams and light green colours with some green tips.
Sphagnum Moss Structure
Sphagnum moss consists of a main stem with two to three spreading branches and two to four hanging branches. The top of the plant consists of tightly clustered side branches which emerge the following season. Along the stem are many leaves which consist of two types of cells: small, green living cells (chlorophyllous cells) and large clear, structural dead cells (hyaline cells) that have a high water holding capacity. Hyaline cells not only help sphagnum moss tolerate drier conditions by storing water, but also contribute to its large water holding capacity when used in growing media.
Seed Starter
Hanging Baskets
Sphagnum moss can be used in hanging planter baskets for flowers. The moss helps keep the soil warm and holds moisture in, keeping the soil from drying out as quickly. Sometimes, the moss is mixed in with the soil, for hanging baskets and in the garden, to aerate the soil and/or add acidity. Florists also use it for decorative and preservative purposes.
Wound Dressing
Because of its extreme absorbency (the moss can absorb many times its own weight), medical personnel used sphagnum moss historically as a wound dressing. They applied the moss either directly to a wound to staunch bleeding or dried and placed in a cloth sack to be pressed to a wound.
House Plants
Place a bit of this moss on top of a house plant’s soil helps keep the plant roots warm and the soil damp–by using sphagnum this way, you’ll cut down the need to water house plants as frequently.
Lifecycle
Sphagnum, like all other land plants, has an alternation of generations; like other bryophytes, the haploid gametophyte generation is dominant and persistent. Unlike other mosses, the long-lived gametophytes do not rely upon rhizoids to assist in water uptake.[3]
Sphagnum species can be unisexual (male or female, dioecious) or bisexual (male and female gametes produced from the same plant; monoecious); In North America, 80% of Sphagnum species are unisexual.[8]
Gametophytes have substantial asexual reproduction by fragmentation, producing much of the living material in sphagnum peatlands.[9]
Swimming sperm fertilize eggs contained in archegonia that remain attached to the female gametophyte. The sporophyte is relatively short-lived, and consists almost entirely of a shiny green, spherical spore capsule that becomes black with spores. Sporophytes are raised on stalks to facilitate spore dispersal, but unlike other mosses, Sphagnum stalks are produced by the maternal gametophyte. Tetrahedral haploid spores are produced in the sporophyte by meiosis, which are then dispersed when the capsule explosively discharges its cap, called an operculum, and shoots the spores some distance. The spores germinate to produce minute protonemae, which start as filaments, can become thalloid, and can produce a few rhizoids. Soon afterwards, the protonema develops buds and these differentiate into its characteristic, erect, leafy, branched gametophyte with chlorophyllose cells and hyaline cells.[10] This stage dominates the environment where Sphagnum grows, obliterating and burying the protonema and eventually building up into layers of dead moss called peat.
Carpets of living Sphagnum may be attacked by various fungi, and one fungus that is also a mushroom, Sphagnurus paluster, produces conspicuous dead patches. When this fungus and other agarics attack the protonema, Sphagnum is induced to produce nonphotosynthetic gemmae that can survive the fungal attack and months later germinate to produce new protonema and leafy gametophytes.[11] It is unknown whether the leafy stage can produce such gemmae.
Location:
- found in wet and boggy areas
- likes acidic (low pH) soil
- generally, not found growing in the woods or in water that contains lime
Characteristics:
- sometimes grows in small patches, but generally found growing in a thick, dense clump
- moss grows so close that it forms a cushiony “bog mat” that floats on top of the water; the mat is so strong that it can support the weight of several large moose
- roots are very shallow
Leaves:
- tiny and sometimes slightly toothed
- grow in hair-like tufts close to the stem (no higher than 4 inches)
- usually light green, but some species have yellow, pink, deep red, or brown leaves
Uses:
A delicate system of capillary tubes allows the moss to absorb water like a sponge. It can then be squeezed out and used again. Dried moss catches fire easily and is therefore an excellent tinder material. However, because moss grows in wet, swampy areas, dried moss is hard to find in abundance, and it does not burn as long as some other more readily available tinder materials.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphagnum
http://www.bio.brandeis.edu/fieldbio/Survival/Pages/sphagnummoss.html
https://www.hunker.com/13406974/what-is-sphagnum-moss-used-for
| Weight | 4 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 55 × 33 × 33 cm |
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When you open up a bag of commercial potting mix, you expect to see little white specks in it without really questioning why they’re there. But what is perlite, really? What is perlite made of? What does it do for the soil, and is there a reason to add more?
Perlite is a form of amorphous volcanic glass, although it’s often confused by new gardeners as being some lightweight material like styrofoam. It’s occasionally called expanded pyrite and has the nickname “volcanic popcorn”, and I’ll get into why in the next segment. If you looked at a piece of horticultural perlite under a microscope, you would see that it’s quite porous. The cavities in perlite help store nutrients and some moisture that the plant might need, but drain excess water away. It is non-toxic, clean, disease-free, and extremely lightweight and easy to work with..
Perlite is often used in industrial settings as well as in the garden. It’s commonly mixed into such products as lightweight plasters, ceiling tiles, or masonry for stability or as an insulator. It’s also popular as a filtration agent, often used for filtering spent grain or other solids out of beer or in the biochemical industry.
There’s many other uses, but to gardeners, it’s an essential ingredient in their garden.
Perlite begins as a naturally-forming volcanic glass, a special variety which is created when obsidian makes contact with water. This type of volcanic glass has a much higher H2O content than other varieties. Like most other materials from volcanic origin, it’s in the grey to black range with some color variation, and is very dense and heavy. So why does the stuff we use in gardening appear to be white and lightweight?
Expanded perlite is formed when normal pyrite is heated. Heating perlite to a range of 1,560-1,650 °F (850-900 °C) causes the mineral to soften. As it does, the water that’s trapped in the volcanic glass vaporizes and tries to escape. This causes the glass to expand to 7-16 times its original volume, and remaining trapped air changes the color from dark to a brilliant white due to the reflectivity of the remaining water inside the glass.
This newly-created material is much lighter in weight than its previous form and has numerous crevices and cavities. It can easily be crushed with moderate pressure, but does not crumble under the light pressure exerted on it by other soils, and it doesn’t decay or shrink. It is clean and sterile.
The typical chemical composition of perlite varies slightly, as most volcanic glass does. However, perlite which is optimal for the expanding process typically consists of 70-75% silicon dioxide. Other chemicals include:
- aluminum oxide (12-15%)
- sodium oxide (3-4%)
- potassium oxide (3-5%)
- iron oxide (0.5-2%)
- magnesium oxide (0.2-0.7%)
- and calcium oxide (0.5-1.5%)
All of these are natural minerals, and are often part of other soil blends. It has a pH of 6.6 to 7.5.
As mentioned earlier, perlite offers a lot of benefits to your garden.
The most important one is drainage. Perlite is a natural filtration system, allowing excess water to easily drain away while retaining a little moisture and catching nutrients that plants need to grow. This is especially true in raised beds and container gardens, but also in the ground as well.
Airflow in the soil is greatly improved in a bed amended with perlite, and that’s necessary both for your plant’s roots to breathe and for any worms, beneficial nematodes, and other good natural garden inhabitants. Because it’s a mineral glass and thus harder than the soil around it, it also helps to slow down compaction, and keeps your soil fluffy and lightweight.
What Type of Perlite to Use
People often ask whether you should use coarse perlite as opposed to medium or fine-grade. Coarse perlite has the highest air porosity, so it offers the most drainage capability and ensures the roots of your plants can breathe well. It’s popular among people who grow orchids and succulents, and also people who do a lot of container gardening, as it provides excellent drainage, but the coarser bits don’t work their way to the surface of the soil blend as much as fine perlite does. Larger perlite is also less prone to being caught by a breeze and blown away!
The finer stuff is useful as well, but it’s used for starting seeds or rooting cuttings as the drainage provided encourages rapid root production. Fine perlite can also be lightly scattered across your lawn’s surface, where over time it’ll work down into the soil and improve drainage.
If you’re making your own potting soil, perlite is one of the most used components in the industry for the above reasons. It’s cheap, lightweight, and easy to blend into peat or other water-retaining ingredients! But there’s other additives like diatomaceous earth and vermiculite. Why shouldn’t you use those instead?
Again, it comes back to drainage. Diatomaceous earth, or DE as it’s also referred to, is more moisture-retentive than perlite is. It’s usually available as a powder rather than a granule, so it doesn’t reduce soil compaction in the same way, and it tends to clump when wet, which doesn’t allow as good airflow. There are many other uses for diatomaceous earth in the garden including pest control, and you can use it in conjunction with your perlite, but not to replace it.
When comparing perlite vs. vermiculite, vermiculite is very moisture retentive. It’ll absorb water and nutrients and keep them in the soil, which makes it perfect for seed starting blends or for plants that prefer lots of water. In conjunction with perlite, the vermiculite will absorb water and nutrients to feed your plants, while the perlite will help drain the excess water away. So both have their own place in your garden, even in the same container or bed, but they’re not interchangeable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlite
Mushroom Compost 30ltr bags
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Mushroom compost makes a great addition to the garden soil. Organic gardening with mushroom compost can be accomplished in several ways and offers many benefits to the garden.
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Sphagnum Moss Gold Grade 5kg (400 Litre)
$170.00 Inc
Buy Sphagnum moss in bulk online
Sphagnum moss grows in damp areas with high soil acidity. It grows in clumps, which can spread over a large area. Gardeners usually know about sphagnum moss and its many uses. Its ability to absorb and retain water and its ability to insulate naturally provides many applications for plant care. However, this moss’s value, historically and in modern times, also extends beyond the garden.
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