garden centre "top soil"

[Paul T]

Anthony,

Thanks.  "Potting Mix" to "Potting Compost" computes nicely! 

[Anthony Darby]

It's a bit like trying to get my head round the word "candy" being used for chocolate in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". Candy is to preserve fruit peel by making the sugar crystalline. I could cope with sugar sweets being called candy, but chocolate bars! Roald Dahl would turn in his grave!

[brianw]

It is interesting how differently (and confusingly if you weren't aware of the difference) words are used in different places.

I often get confused over what in the UK is usually called (spaghnum) moss peat and north Americans call spaghnum peat moss, but often gets abbreviated to peat moss. So what is the brown stuff used in potting compost/mixes called down under?
With Canadian blond peat and New Zealand spaghnum moss also being mentioned it all gets mixed up when describing the colours.

[rob krejzl]

what is the brown stuff used in potting compost/mixes called down under?

Composted bark.

[Anthony Darby]

Moss peat is a brown composition up to 10,000 years old which is found under layers of sphagnum, a type of moss found on a moss (peat bog). Peat moss is a manufactured product made from decayed sphagnum. Is this naturally decayed or composted? Goodness alone knows why it is called peat moss and not moss peat?

[Lesley Cox]

Top soil as such, is the top 15cms or more skimmmed off land about to be developed for housing, usually, in NZ. It used to be taken away by the skimmer and sold to the unsuspecting for their gardens, they unaware that it was full of oxalis, convolvulus, sorrel (Californian thistle in my last lot) or whatever. Now, the law requires that such soil removed must be retained, or a part of it anyway, and replaced in the original area. Basically though, top soil is a desirable product.

We can buy peat in bags or bales, compressed dusty stuff which is horrid and very hard to moisten. Most comes from the Hauraki Plains in the North Island. I avoid it like the plague.

We can buy Southland peat which has a more spaghnum-like texture, not so dusty and more easily wettable. Both are very expensive.

We can also buy small bags of dried (fawny coloured) spaghnum moss which comes from the West Coast of the South Island and is only harvestable under special licence, mostly for export to Japan. If I need spaghnum I scrape up what is growing under our pine trees, a different species from true spaghnum, green and soft and easy to re-establish around pleiones or wherever, if cool and damp.

As Rob says, we also buy composted bark, in my case pine bark fines which I use extensively in my potting/seed mix. Ideally this is composted (let lie in a heap) for at least 9 months but as more and more people want it, the composting time becomes shorter and as a local trillium grower says, sometimes "you can hear the birds still singing in it."

I guess most areas or garden centre chains have their own versions of these products. John Innes composts or mixes have never been available in NZ but the recipes are in L D Hills' book "Propagation of Alpine Plants" I think. Personally, I've never bothered.

[Anthony Darby]

Please note spelling of sphagnum. Sphagnum spp. was used as a sterile dressing during world war one. I think I've seen dried New Zealand sphagnum for sale in Scotland for lining hanging baskets?

[Lesley Cox]

Yes, spaghnum moss is well known as a sterile dressing in wartime and other circumstances when medical supplies are not available, but still not considered sufficiently sterile to be used as a wrapping for plant material entering NZ. Only vermiculite or clean (new) newspaper are acceptable to cushion bulbs or plants.

[Anthony Darby]

Please note spelling of sphagnum. Sphagnum spp. was used as a sterile dressing during world war one. I think I've seen dried New Zealand sphagnum for sale in Scotland for lining hanging baskets?

New Zealand has its own species of Sphagnum, so perhaps it doesn't need any more?

[fredg]

Please note spelling of sphagnum. Sphagnum spp. was used as a sterile dressing during world war one. I think I've seen dried New Zealand sphagnum for sale in Scotland for lining hanging baskets?

I would have thought Scotland would have enough of its own sphagnum.

I topped up my own stock yesterday from a local nursery, it's English.

( now wearing narrower stilts  )

[Maggi Young]

( now wearing narrower stilts  )

Friends : we hope for photos sometime soon of Fred on his custom made stilts.. which will bear a remarkable resemblence to knitting needles or chopsticks.

[Anthony Darby]

( now wearing narrower stilts  )

Friends : we hope for photos sometime soon of Fred on his custom made stilts.. which will bear a remarkable resemblence to knitting needles or chopsticks.

The mind boggles.

http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/1999/06/15/rural-sphagnum/

[Paul T]

No idea what the stilt references are intended to mean?

Anthony,

I like the article.... a few horticultural phrases nicely worked into the text as they went. 

[Maggi Young]

No idea what the stilt references are intended to mean?

See here... for references to overcrowded garden spaces....

http://www.srgc.org.uk/forum/index.php?topic=8320.msg241708#msg241708 

[Paul T]

Thank you.  Makes sense now.

And also thanks for reminding me that I got part way caught up on that Trillium topic, but hadn't finished the last few pages...... will have to get back and have a look at it now.