FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

NightRaider wrote:

nimbulan wrote: Pour it into a paint straining bag then wring that out. Then you can just drop the bag into your bucket and do subsequent soaks while leaving the peat in the bag. Saves a ton of time and greatly reduces waste.

Tried doing it that way with a cheap pillowcase originally but it didn’t work very well. Couldn’t get nearly as much water out of it that way so I just went back to doing it by hand. It may work better with a different material though, so next time I have to do a large batch again I may try that.

Yeah I can see a pillowcase both being messy (peat sticking to the fabric) and being more difficult to wring out. I've been using paint straining bags for years and it works great. It does become more difficult to wring out the more peat you rinse at once, but since it makes rinsing much faster and you don't have to be THAT thorough wringing the peat out.

TrapsAndDews wrote: ↑Mon Apr 25, 2022 5:23 pm Do you guys rinse your peat? And do you see any benefits when you rinse your peat?

I have never rinsed my peat moss. No need to IMHO.

I don't really use peat but I did make an effort to rinse some and mix it with perlite to start some flytrap seedlings. I think I mainly wanted to have a flatter surface that the green of the plant will show more easily against, which would be harder to accomplish with sphagnum.

It wasn't too hard. All I did was blast and it hose water (30-50 ppm) and transferred it to another container before repeating the process a couple more times. Then I just rinsed it with distilled water at the end. My goal was to get the ppm of the runoff a good deal lower. And it worked really well. I didn't get any algae or mold for a while. Of course I had to deal with fungus gnats though.