spawnsmash
Newly Registered
Posts: 1
Joined: Tue Apr 03, 2018 10:22 am

Cheap Expanded Clay Growing Medium

Hello! This is my first post, so my apologies if I've made any mistakes!

I've recently gotten into hydroponics for starting my hot peppers indoors over the winter. I'm using the Kratky method, and so far, the results have been very encouraging.

All of the supplies were cheap enough to get started, except for the lighting...but the one thing that I kept putting off was the growing medium. I wanted to use, probably the most popular growing medium, expanded clay spheres, but everywhere I looked it seemed like suppliers wanted upwards of $60 for as little as 10lbs. bags. This seemed like robbery to me! I guess I should also mention that I live in Canada, I'm not sure on pricing in the US.

Anyways, after over a month and a half of searching I happened to completely by chance, stumble upon the fact that expanded clay spheres had another popular market in reptile enclosures and terrariums. It seems people use them in their terrariums to keep the humidity levels in check, which makes sense, but most importantly, that same 10lbs. bag cost $11... I purchased some right away, and it arrived the other day. I wasn't able to find any difference between the two products, and my plants seem to be doing great with them! I know gardening supplies have a huge mark-up on them but...wow!

Basically the point of this post was to 1) ask if anyone knows of any reason why terrarium expanded clay substrate would be different or unusable in a hydroponics set-up, and; 2) if the answer to the first question is that there isn't any difference, for anyone looking to start up a hydroponics system, instead of searching for expanded clay spheres for gardening, switch your keywords to "reptile" or "terrarium" substrate, and you can save yourself $40-$45!

Hope this was helpful to anyone else starting out and looking to save some cash!

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TexasT
Newly Registered
Posts: 7
Joined: Sun Feb 03, 2019 6:27 pm
Location: Texas

Nice find.



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