Quote:
Originally Posted by PR-Giants
In my experience, the soil has always been the most important part of the plants' environment that I can influence. It has a direct impact on root pressure which affects plant growth and yield.
Can you explain in more detail why it becomes meaningless in your overwintering setup.
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For some context, maybe have a look at these threads if you haven’t already:
Over winter potting mix?
Potting pups in sand
I lost a lot of plants (all of my Dwarf Orinoco and many of my HH) in my garage over the last few cold seasons (first year not as bad, but I still had losses). Most of them had been established in the same pots over the growing season and simply moved into the garage. I was blaming the mix I was using (home made) because even plants that I didn’t water at all succumbed to rot. My thinking was that primarily the coir (about 25% if I remember correctly, but maybe 33%, not near my notes) was holding too much moisture for the conditions.
The temperature was generally in the 40’s over the winter months, but would occasionally dip into the high 30’s, or climb to the mid 50’s.
They were next to south facing, insulated windows but the sun here is below the top of the tree line for several months and therefore doesn’t really cast that much light into the garage, not to mention it’s usually overcast. They also had a single 4 foot, T5 supplemental grow light and, in one space, a reflective perimeter.
Not exactly ideal conditions but I figured for those varieties they would be adequate for quasi dormant storage.
Maybe I was correct in my original assumption that the mix was the primary culprit, and maybe I wasn’t. However, because I now wasn’t sure temperature and light conditions weren’t at least part of the problem, and I couldn’t really afford to lose any more plants, I deferred to my interpretation of the comment and set up the current situation which I am hopeful will work.
So, I took the ‘meaningless’ comment in the spirit I believe was intended which is to suggest that I may be focusing too much on the mix and not considering other parameters that may be contributing to my difficulties. I don’t think anybody would seriously try to argue that growing medium is an unimportant factor.
Going forward, when I again have enough excess material to truly experiment with, I will play around with the suggestions throughout the forum for different mixes and see what more I can learn relevant to my situation.