Sphagnum cultivation

[meizzwang]

After discussing the topic of Sphagnum moss in another thread, I figured I'd post a little something about growing this wonderful moss. This outstanding carnivorous plant companion grows in many carnivorous plant habitats across the planet, and there are various species within the genus Sphagnum. It's also an incredible medium for many carnivorous plants, orchids, epiphytes, etc.

I used to buy bales of dried Sphagnum moss every year to repot my Disa orchids (south african terrestrial orchid), but it's becoming more and more difficult to source good quality moss these days. When I did get these bales, grasses and all sorts of other crap came with it. What I've learned is this moss is actually a renewable resource, yet it is harvested commercially from the wild. Anytime you buy this moss, chances are it was from the wild.

My hope is that this post will spark some of you to consider growing it instead of having it harvested from the wild. I've heard from many friends that they dream of becoming a sphagnum farmer, and let me tell you this much: if you become one and are successful, you'll go down in the history books as being the first to pioneer it! No doubt, the methods below can be applied to a commercial operation, and there is no such operation in existence as of today (11/20/15).

Quality bales of Sphagnum go for more than $100 and have to be shipped half way across the globe to get to California (where I live), so I figured, what the heck, let me see if I can grow this stuff. It was shocking to see how big of a yield you can get from growing your own moss. Within a year, out of seven 10x20 trays, I harvested more than a wheel barrel full (more than a bale) worth of moss! The crazy thing is, it doesn't even look like that much until you actually harvest it.

How do you grow Sphagnum moss? As mentioned earlier, I grow them in 10x20 trays. The trays are 90% filled with old, dead sphagnum moss (or you could fill it with peat moss) and then every fall/early winter, with scissors, I cut the active growth points off my "mother moss plants" and place it in the trays. It's kept very water-logged, and I fertilize with maxsea 1-2x per month. Use slightly lower concentrations as you would for filling up pitchers of Sarracenia. This moss likes as much light as possible, but it also wants to be kept cool.

During the winter, the trays of moss are kept in full sun when it's nice and cold, and once the day temperatures get above 78F, they get morning sun/afternoon shade. I rarely have to water them during the winter, but during the summer, they get overhead watered with low TDS water daily.

Here's a photo of some Sphagnum moss, there are 7 trays total, and this is after a year's worth of growth:


Okay, here comes the shocker. Would you have guessed that those 7 small trays of moss yielded more than a Wheel Barrel full?! I have more harvested that isn't pictured below. Imagine if you had an acre of this moss, and you harvested it annually... Unlike much of the wild stuff, this is free of weeds, sticks, and other crap. I could barely believe my eyes after harvesting this stuff, there was so much of it:



The tops were cut off and placed right back into the original trays. I actually had enough "tops" to plant perhaps 40-50 trays, but space is an issue, so I went for 8 trays this time. In a year, this will look just like the first picture in this thread:



I hope everyone goes out and does this so we place less pressure on wild Sphagnum bogs. It takes up relatively little space, and produces an outstanding yield every year. IF you grow 20-30 trays of this stuff every year, you'll have enough moss to grow a commercial quantity of orchids, epiphytes, carnivorous plants, etc.

[katyadog1]

I got permission from a landowner near me to take some temperate, shade loving Sphagnum that looks exactly like yours. Hopefully it will look like that in another few years-- Live Sphagnum is so hard to come by in large amounts! And when you do find it, you break the bank for a gallon of the stuff.

It's nuts considering how easy it is to grow the stuff with proper care. Thanks for sharing those pictures! Motivation. Motivation is key.

That and weekly MaxSea sprayings.

[meizzwang]

I'd be careful with weekly fertilizer applications, the salts might build up to a toxic level. It won't happen immediately: you'll probably see nice growth, and then all of the sudden it'll crash. Much like carnivorous plants, there's no going back if you overdo it just once. With a 2X a month regiment, that's 24 applications in a year, which is already pushing it.

[katyadog1]

Nov 24, 2015 12:41:00 GMT -5 meizzwang said:

I'd be careful with weekly fertilizer applications, the salts might build up to a toxic level. It won't happen immediately: you'll probably see nice growth, and then all of the sudden it'll crash. Much like carnivorous plants, there's no going back if you overdo it just once. With a 2X a month regiment, that's 24 applications in a year, which is already pushing it.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I use 1/6 of a tsp per gallon of water (under the assumption that 1 tsp per gallon is "full" strength), and I flood and drain the sphagnum every month to prevent any buildup. Mine is in a tray, but it hasn't even gotten close to what yours looks like, so I can completely submerge it.

Do you think this is too much? I'll certainly dial it back if need be!

[meizzwang]

Think of Sphagnum as a sponge: it'll absorb and hold whatever you put into it. If you water with fertilizer water, that sponge will absorb both water and nutrients. Every time you fertilize, more nutrients go into the sphagnum, so salts will slowly build up. Even if you flood and drain a tray of sphagnum moss with purified water, you won't necessarily be getting rid of the higher fertilizer concentrations in the moss if you don't flush immediately....it's a little counter-intuitive.

How do you get rid of excess fertilizer that's trapped in the moss? First you flood the tray with DI water and let it sit for maybe 20-40 minutes. You're creating a hypotonic solution and water will flow out of the cells of the sphagnum and into the puddle of water in the tray. Then you drain and repeat...maybe 5-10 times?

This is why it's recommended to fertilize with caution to begin with. No leaching needed. Less work. Less chance of over fertilizing and killing the whole thing. It's hard to leach out salts because the sphagnum absorbs and holds onto it like a sponge. Also, every time you leach, you're squeezing out not only the nutrients but also humid acid and other beneficial organic compounds that help buffer the soil. For this same exact reason, it's difficult to leach out salty peat moss (well, even more difficult because it has a higher density, so less surface area is exposed to DI water when you try to flood/leach it).

Katya: now to answer your question: you could probably do that, but it's a lot more work, and you still might get too much fertilizer concentrating in there over time. With 1/6th concentration every week, that's 2/3 tsp fertilizer per month, versus a maximum of 1/2tsp per month with a 1/4 tsp every two weeks. Again, with 1/6 tsp per week, you probably won't see any toxicity until many months later down the road, it'll take a while to build up.

[rmeyer]

Didn't realize just how much leaching is necessary to remove salts in the media. I think I need to be more careful with MaxRoid applications to my seedlings.....hahaha! 

[calen]

meizzwang apologies for getting off topic but you mentioned leaching peat moss. I have a bale that creates 80 ppm pore water when mixed into a wet mud suitable for potting using RO water. Usable but not great. I'd like to leach it to 25-40 ppm or so if possible. How hard will that be? I'd be flushing with the Portland tap water, which is about 20-22 ppm lately. I was planning on just re-testing the leachate until it got down to where I want, but am I wasting my time?

[billredlionpa]

I'm loving this thread

[katyadog1]

Nov 24, 2015 14:10:54 GMT -5 meizzwang said:

Think of Sphagnum as a sponge: it'll absorb and hold whatever you put into it. If you water with fertilizer water, that sponge will absorb both water and nutrients. Every time you fertilize, more nutrients go into the sphagnum, so salts will slowly build up. Even if you flood and drain a tray of sphagnum moss with purified water, you won't necessarily be getting rid of the higher fertilizer concentrations in the moss....it's a little counter-intuitive.

How do you get rid of excess fertilizer that's trapped in the moss? First you flood the tray with DI water and let it sit for maybe 20-40 minutes. You're creating a hypotonic solution and water will flow out of the cells of the sphagnum and into the puddle of water in the tray. Then you drain and repeat...maybe 5-10 times?

This is why it's recommended to fertilize with caution to begin with. No leaching needed. Less work. Less chance of over fertilizing and killing the whole thing. It's hard to leach out salts because the sphagnum absorbs and holds onto it like a sponge. Also, every time you leach, you're squeezing out not only the nutrients but also humid acid and other beneficial organic compounds that help buffer the soil. For this same exact reason, it's difficult to leach out salty peat moss (well, even more difficult because it has a higher density, so less surface area is exposed to DI water when you try to flood/leach it).

Katya: now to answer your question: you could probably do that, but it's a lot more work, and you still might get too much fertilizer concentrating in there over time. With 1/6th concentration every week, that's 2/3 tsp fertilizer per month, versus a maximum of 1/2tsp per month with a 1/4 tsp every two weeks. Again, with 1/6 tsp per week, you probably won't see any toxicity until many months later down the road, it'll take a while to build up.

*sigh* I'm not looking forward to leaching my sphagnum. Sounds time intensive. I haven't fertilized for the past couple of weeks, so I guess when I fertilize again, I'll switch my regimen to what you do.

In the meantime, I've got one tray to leach.

[dozer1028]

Here's some beautiful red spagnum I bought at Meadowview Biological research station.

[meizzwang]

Dozer: beautiful moss, and I'll give you a dollar to munch that shroom, hehe

Calen: That's actually totally relevant. 80ppm is pretty high to begin with, but it's not the end of the world, especially now that you're in rainy Oregon and you can let nature leach out salts for you. I don't know the exact answer to your question, but here's a story that might help lead you in the right direction: 2 years ago, I planted probably 30 leucophylla rhizomes in one of those home depot black mixing tubs with 225ppm peat moss. I almost cried when the TDS meter read such a high number. I flooded the tray with 22ppm water, let it sit, and then drained the salty water out 6-7 times, and the TDS finally went down to 43ppm. YAY!? Unfortunately, no. Weeks later, I noticed there was salt build up on the soil surface and the plants didn't look that great. I tested the peat, and it went back up to 170ppm. WTF?

A quick leach might get rid of the salt already dissolved in the water/peat solution, but to get that salt out of the peat "cells" requires a lot of time and a lot of leaching!


Did another 3 leaches in a row weeks later and it was back down to about 40 something ppm. Okay, back out of the red zone? Still not, it went back up to 90ppm weeks later again! This is when I gave up and just hoped for the best. Quite a few plants rotted out, but after such a long struggle, I finally squeezed the salt out.

Okay, 1 year and a full grow season later, I checked the TDS of the peat during the dormancy period. It was in the 20's!!!! Turns out, the best way to get rid of the salt is to have the Sarracenias eat it up! Only catch is, if you start out too salty, they won't live long enough to lower the TDS and tell the story. They'll get diseases which spreads to the otherwise healthy plants. They'll attract pests. They'll slowly decline over time. Repeat this same story with about 5 other community trays of various Sarracenia species to fully understand and appreciate good quality peat that is low in salts to begin with. There's a reason I'm thinking about growing huge volumes of sphagnum moss

[hunter]

meizzwang,this might be a little of topic but have just been reading through this thread and it has made me think i may have a high salt content in my recently planted mini bogs,the plants started out ok but are in quick decline and pitchers don't last long before they seem to become killed off by a fungal infection also noticed pitchers are smaller than usual and i have some wilting witch i think will be rhizome root in one of the plants,from the same bale of peat i replanted all of the of the seedlings that i got as seeds from you expecting them to crank into gear but instead almost lost them all to what looks like the same sort of fungal infection as i explained above the seedlings are now on the road to recovery but the mini bogs are not and all i can think is the more densely populated seeding pot used up all the nutrient and/or the small pot was flushed more efficiently vs the larger bogs with not that many plants in,i will measure ppm tomorrow but just wanted to know if you think im on the right track.

[calen]

The great peat leaching experiment is on. I have a drained bin full of wet 65-80 ppm peat that I am pouring rainwater through on a daily basis. Side note: the rainwater that fell last night read "000" on my TDS meter - atmospherically distilled so it should work well for leaching. I collected a couple gallons of rainwater last night and ran it through the bin a few hours ago. Just poured another couple gallons in and collected some leachate: 43 ppm at 45 degrees F, 63 ppm at 75 degrees. I'll report back after a few more flushes.

[meizzwang]

Calen: you might also want to purchase some glasses that are super-thick just for added effect.

[calen]

Dec 3, 2015 16:38:12 GMT -5 meizzwang said:

Calen: you might also want to purchase some glasses that are super-thick just for added effect.

BAHAHAHA! Dude for realz. Got my lab coat and slide rule goin' strong already. Just bought another bale of moss - 1. 7. 5. With cold water. Def over 200 ppm at room temp. Disastrous.