Pine bark chips or CHC is not available in our market, so I need to find a solution for this situation.

We have a mountain house and the goverment controls the pine forests near our house.Sometimes they cut trees and let people collect the bark.

Can I just collect pine bark, crumb them, keep in water few days, dry and use for soil mix?

Or do they need a chemical operation or something else similar?

Thanks,

Pine, and conifer barks in general, require no pretreatment. Pine chips work well as an ingredient in growth mediums. The main difference between pine and CHC is the amount of time that they last before degrading. You do not want to use the bark of hard wood trees, as most hard wood varieties contain toxic levels of manganese. When you crumble the bark, the sizing should be between 1/4 inch to 1/2 inch, even a few 1-inch pieces in the blend would work well. If I made a growth medium using bark, it would be 3 parts pine bark, 1 part peat moss and one part coarse sand (builders sand). You might also check with nurseries and garden centers in your area to see if you can locate an orchid mix containing the same size chips as listed above. - Millet

I make my own pine bark chips all the time. I have a few in CHC, but the majority of my seedlings are in pine bark chips I crumbled by hand and they have done well--possibly even better than the CHC. I recently repotted many of mine and all of the pine based plants did well, but I lost one of the ones in CHC--I don't really know what happened, but I think it may have lost to many fine root hairs that go into the CHC chips and got too dry.

Thanks a lot Millet, so I will collect some to try.

Thanks a lot Skeeter, I missed your reply while replying Millet.

Millet's suggestion for a pine bark mix is about what I use at my nursery. The sand Millet is referring to is not the fine sand used as fill on new building sites, but the course sand used mostly in mixing cement, and in mason work. Where the extra weight of the sand would be a problem, course perlite can be used instead. I also add Micromax to the recipe.

Ned

Hi,

I have 300kgs of pine barks collected.I also found a machine to crumb them and already tested.

Final result is good, I can control the bark piece size but I noticed that while crumbing the barks, some parts are turning to dust, red bark dust.

Can I keep the bark dust and use it with the chips or do I have to remove the dust? Does the dust effects the roots in a negative way?

Thanks,

Here is something from the UF on growth media for containers.

Ned

http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/CN004

Thanks a lot Ned, a great page with lots of information.

Quote:

Research at the University of Georgia has shown that milled pine bark with 70 to 80 percent of the particles by volume within a range of 1/42 to 3/8-inch (0.6 to 9.5 mm) in diameter, with the remaining particles less than 1/42 inch (0.6 mm), is a good potting medium component.

I guess that particles less than 1/42 inch can be count as the dust I am describing.
So, I guess I may use the dust.
Did I get it right with my limited English?

I would not use pine bark dust. Large pine bark chips degrade slow enough (but much faster than CHC) to be used as an ingredient in potting soils, but pine bark dust will degrade VERY quickly, due to the high surface area of the dust. The dust will clog the pour space. I would use only the chips that are 1/2 inch or larger, plus peat moss (or coir) and cement sand.

There are various sand types sold in stores like Home Depot, OSH or Lowes if you try to read the labels. Select the one which is rinsed or has a similar statement "also good for general horticultural or landscape purposes".

Other sand type could still have salts (many kinds) in them. Or are very fine, which are used for playground.

Thanks for your replies.

So I will sift the dust from the chips. I will weigh the bag both with dust and without dust and I will see how much do we lost as dust.

Finding good type of sand is no problem, thanks for the recommendations.

Best,