Beginner Gardening: Good Growing Practices - an Overview for Beginners, 1 by tapla

tapla wrote:
Turface is inert and has no odor of its own, but mixing it with organic ingredients that break down quickly can produce unpleasant smelling gasses, but the same can be said for any other inert soil ingredient as well. You're more likely to notice odors in any of your plantings if you use organic forms of fertilizers. Those would be things like various meals (blood, bone, hoof, horn, feather, cotton seed .....), fish emulsion, seaweed emulsion, and similar. An over-wet soil with as soggy layer at the bottom of the pot will find bacteria and fungi that thrive in anaerobic (airless) conditions working extra hard to produce the gasses associated with decay.

Make sure you screen your Turface through insect screen or a regular size mesh kitchen strainer before you use it for the very best results. The whole idea behind making the gritty mix is to produce a soil with particles large enough that it holds lots of air and no perched water. We depend on the fact that the bark and Turface are internally porous, holding water INSIDE the particles and not between them. This is the departure from soils made of smaller particles (peat, compost, coir, topsoil, sand .....) that makes the gritty mix and the 5:1:1 mix so easy to grow in and productive. When it comes to soil particles - size matters.

Al