Some Thoughts on Coco Coir
Posted: Fri Sep 28, 2018 3:34 pm
On the strength of this video (he gets 0 ppm for a bag of non-compressed coir):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keAueRtsroI
I bought this 5k bale of Mother Earth Coir (for about $11):
https://www.amazon.com/Mother-Earth-Nat ... =coco+coir
I expanded a very small portion of the bale (the remainder still weighs about 11 lbs) to make a bucketfull. I squeezed out some of the water and tested it with my TDS meter (the best 99 cents I have spent on eBay, by the way) and I got 140 ppm above the tap water I had used (260 ppm total). Maybe the machine used to compress the bale has some salty residue that transfers to the bale.
After the first rinsing it came down to 50-something ppm, so I was relieved. I rinsed it another time or two to make sure it was ready to use on my plants.
All in all, I think I really like this stuff. It seems light and airy. You can squeeze the water out of a handful and it springs back to the original volume, whereas peat tends to stay compressed. I have only been using it for a few months but so far I don't see much if any algae or mold on it.
If there could be some kind of rinsing standards at the manufacturer's to assure a truly lower TDS and not just sales pitch claims on the labels this could be a very useful medium.
One more phenomenon about coir that I have noticed recently: When I rinsed some already-rinsed coir with 122 ppm tap water by mistake and measured the TDS of the runoff after squeezing it out, the reading was around 90 ppm. I repeated the "experiment" a few times since and got readings between 70-90 ppm.
What is happening? Is the coir actually absorbing solids from the water? Perhaps keeping them away from the plants, or storing them up to unleash on my poor unsuspecting plants later?
Has anyone noticed this before?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keAueRtsroI
I bought this 5k bale of Mother Earth Coir (for about $11):
https://www.amazon.com/Mother-Earth-Nat ... =coco+coir
I expanded a very small portion of the bale (the remainder still weighs about 11 lbs) to make a bucketfull. I squeezed out some of the water and tested it with my TDS meter (the best 99 cents I have spent on eBay, by the way) and I got 140 ppm above the tap water I had used (260 ppm total). Maybe the machine used to compress the bale has some salty residue that transfers to the bale.
After the first rinsing it came down to 50-something ppm, so I was relieved. I rinsed it another time or two to make sure it was ready to use on my plants.
All in all, I think I really like this stuff. It seems light and airy. You can squeeze the water out of a handful and it springs back to the original volume, whereas peat tends to stay compressed. I have only been using it for a few months but so far I don't see much if any algae or mold on it.
If there could be some kind of rinsing standards at the manufacturer's to assure a truly lower TDS and not just sales pitch claims on the labels this could be a very useful medium.
One more phenomenon about coir that I have noticed recently: When I rinsed some already-rinsed coir with 122 ppm tap water by mistake and measured the TDS of the runoff after squeezing it out, the reading was around 90 ppm. I repeated the "experiment" a few times since and got readings between 70-90 ppm.
What is happening? Is the coir actually absorbing solids from the water? Perhaps keeping them away from the plants, or storing them up to unleash on my poor unsuspecting plants later?
Has anyone noticed this before?