81renaissance said:

No need to use both perlite and verm, they serve the same purpose.

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Harry_Ba11sach said:

81renaissance said:

No need to use both perlite and verm, they serve the same purpose.

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I have to disagree with this....

initially yes both add porosity to the soil which is a plus, while perlite is completely inert and pH neutral and thus adds nothing to the soil but porosity, vermiculite is a highly expansive 2:1 clay (thus named for it's alternating sheets of octrahedral to tetrahedral) lattice layers in the silicate structure. it's laid out like this (* being 1 lattice form, & being the other)

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all over the exterior and in between those alternating layers are highly charged cation exchange sites that basically grab onto various nutritive ions (mg+, ca^2+, NH4-, NO3-, K+ etc etc etc) and only release them when the proper proportion of H+ and OH- ions are available to displace them from their bonding sites (hence why poor pH can cause nutrient lockout; pH is a negative log function measuring concentration of H+ in solution).

basically what I'm saying is this; perlite helps your roots breath and improves drainage. Vermiculite actually stores water and nutritious particles so that the soil is actually feeding the plant much more vigorously at all times, and more nutrients are available for soil microfauna to digest and in turn produce more easily usable forms of mineralized ions.

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