Beginner Gardening: How much time do you spend gardening?, 1 by Jaywhacker

Jaywhacker wrote:
I dont know from nothing about cactus and succulents. :-) The grow mix supplied by EZgro is about 80% perlite and 20% vermiculite. If that is a good mix for what you are growing, they might work good for you. It is just about impossible to overwater something in that mix. On the same pole, I have grown some plants that are advertised as "pre-ferring dry conditions" and others that require more moisture without any problems that I could recognize.

I have been experimenting too much this year though and have some different grow mixes in different poles. Some poles hold more moisture than others and it makes it hard to water all the poles at the same time from an automatic timer. Next year, I think I will put 80% perlite and 20% coir in all the poles. EZgro has this growing system down pat and I should not have varied so much from their basic grow mix but I love to experiment.

Here is a picture of my tomato experiment this year......two early girl tomato's planted in the top pot of a four pot stack. I learned last year that tomato roots will run from an upper pot down through the drainage holes into the pot below it. These roots are already reaching down to the third pot down below and will probably have some roots reaching all the way down to the bottom pot before the year is out. They are really looking healthy and have some tomato's on them already but have suffered a couple of set backs because of some very erratic spring weather so I dont know what the final results will be. Tomato's ain't really my thang but I always try some. I have planted some other early girls in some large containers to compare to the pole grown ones. Here is a gallery of pictures of stuff other people have grown in EZgro's:

http://www.theezgro.com/gallery.html