Hey it's Jason here from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and today i'm at sumas grow media a lot of people
have asked me before where do i get my soil from i talked a little about a video last year
well this is the place and excuse the noise it is a busy place but i got a chance to have a tour
with my soil guy everybody should have a soil guy or i guess equally a soil gal if that's the
equivalent respectful term for women who do the same job. He gave me
a tour around the facility i'm gonna stick it in here it was a it was a good and long tour and try
to get it down to the points that you guys might be the most interested in so hang tight and i'll
give you that footage here: So that was the coconut in the raw form then once we once we
process it because when when the coconut grows on the on the most of time they grow
close to the coast so when they grow they suck up the salt from from the environment and the salt
actually stays within the tissue of the plant so when you harvest it and you use the coconut
in the media you have to dislodge that salt
and we do that in the next couple of days we do that with by adding calcium nitrate and
turning the mix and then adding more calcium so that's something you do here it's not something
you get the supplier to do if you if you were to grow in this stuff straight out of the
the blocks it would nothing would ever go because you'd have a very very high parts per million of
sodium now when people buy uh this is called coir yeah when they buy it when they buy it from
overseas is it coming in with that salt or is it coming in coming in with with that salt yes
okay you have to be careful. Here at Sumas we treat everything like it's unwashed right because
we've bought wash material that's had salt in it we've got unwashed material that's had salt in it
so we just say everything is going to get treated in the in the same way then it's going to get
tested and if it passes it goes into production like this if it fails it just goes right back
into the into the leeching process well that's good to know because a lot of people are treating
coir like it's the the holy answer to peat but if it's coming in with high salt levels
it's coming in with high salt levels it is a waste product but you're schlepping it from
sri lanka and this is like a four-week journey in in a tanker so peat has a carbon footprint
coir has a different kind of carbon footprint probably lower and and certainly you're not
you know removing a wetland when you right when you work with with coconut but it's not a zero
right in terms of carbon footprint like some of the the wood waste products that we have are even
lower in carbon footprint because they're grown organically they're a waste product and they're
local they're local right so the ships that bring this they burn 2 000 liters an hour of fuel so
that's a sizable amount of fuel by the time you get a container shipping container of
of material here so when you deal with compost you always have a carbon to nitrogen ratio
we get organic chicken manure and organic dairy manure and that composes a large fraction of
the green section of the compost but you need to have some brown section of the compost so we use
some of our wood fibers to to add to that so they have more of a balance so they have a better
C to N ratio the other thing is compost by nature or manures by nature have a very high pH
into the eights so if you add wood fiber wood fiber has a has a very low pH so a pH of four
so you get a much more usable product that's one reason why when people continuously use mushroom
manure in their garden it works great the first year the second year and the third year it's not
working that good anymore is because the compost has a ph of nine and then over over years you
you raise the pH of your of your soil to a point where you're getting a lock out of iron so
your plant can't assimilate iron anymore and a lot of the other metals and then they go yellow yeah
so they look more like our vest rather than nice nice and green this is another organic product
that is mined there's a mine here in Pemberton this is a product called volcanic pumice yeah
and we have that in two different grades this is the larger grade it's similar in many ways
to perlite except perlite is essentially man-made they they blast that in furnaces they take an
ore and the ore curiously enough has a water molecule locked inside it when you heat the ore
very high the water molecule turns into steam and explodes the ore
and you end up with a popcorn looking thing like perlite yeah but that takes a tremendous amount of
energy this the energy was all supplied by mother nature and uh happened thousands of years ago
but it's a similar sort of product perlite is much lighter than pumice pumice is better
suited for a nursery type application and and the perlite is more suited for maybe a
inside greenhouse application like what's the cost difference between pumice and perlite
about half okay perlite is about two-thirds the price of pumice. Pumice is very expensive okay
it's not the fact the pumice is actually cheap at the mine right let's bring it here yeah so
you're going to hear this reoccurring nightmare of trucking yeah that's that's uh yeah the soil
business is the shipping business basically you've got a big bulky low value product that you've got
to move from point a to point b yeah and a lot of the cost of it is associated with the truck
yeah there's this product called hydrofiber so hydro fiber is made from a species of pine wood
and the furniture is a byproduct from the furniture industry so they take all the
little bits and and pieces of furniture that don't get turned into furniture and they
grind them up uh using stone uh wheels basically um so that they they bring out the fibers then
in addition to that they use high quantities of heat so that they removed all the the the sugars
from the sap in the pine you can still probably smell it it says a slight smell of pine but
um not a lot and what what they the reason that they take out all the sugars is when you
add wood fiber to a growing material it'll steal all the nitrogen because the bacteria that are
associated with those sugars all want to process the nitrogen and they'll they'll get a tiger war
between the plant and the media and the media will always win
until that media is fully composted the media will always win the tiger war over the plant
so that's why it's very very important that they take out all those sugars so when we add this
material to growing medias we don't end up with a nitrogen problem who wants to save money on a
growing media if you're going to have to add three times the amount of nitrogen right and then you're
also chasing your tail right because how much do i add how much no so it's better to have the sugars
removed and then you have a more stable growing material yeah this is a big pile of hydro fiber
so when the when we buy this material it actually comes compressed six to one so one bale of
hydrofiber like about the size of that lavatory over there will create 20 yards of material so
it's very very heavily compressed so you have to have a special machine to take it apart to
fluff it out yeah definitely i would consider looking at that material because what it does
is it it turns the mix into essentially kind of more of a sponge all our mixes are are relatively
nutrient void and they're essentially biological deserts so you need to supply the nutrient and
you need to supply the beneficial bacteria all we're supplying really is a matrix or a framework
for the roots to grow because essentially you're growing hydroponically you're just using organic
material to grow hydroponically in opposed to maybe glass wool which would be inorganic material
to grow in but the materials themselves are not providing a tremendous amount of nutrient or
anything else they're providing stability for the plant so the mainstay for the nursery
materials has always been furbar or has been in the past furbar so this furbar
we actually pay particular attention to because there's two places you can get furbar
one is from the coast and those logs come in on the ferrari inlet maybe up the fraser river
but when you when you peel those logs and take the bark off this the salt content in in the bark
can be very very hot and so if you're buying bark for your landscape and you buy it from some guy in
cloverdale or some other guy he's going to have taken peeled logs from the the broad inlet and
if you're going to put it around your road it enters and stops that's going to be fine if you
take material from the broad inlet and you put it in a pot you're going to have a salt index that's
way too high and you're going to get you're going to get problems so all of this bark actually comes
from lillewet so we either take bark from lilla wet and use material that's never been in seawater
or we get parked from squamish from a place that's called a dry land sort so they don't use water to
convey the the logs across they use uh machinery okay so that material
comes from a dry land sort in squamish this material comes from another dry land sort in
uh but i've had great success at my farm with this product so what this product is is a screened
cedar material so if you have a you know a regular diameter pot
you fill the pot up until it's about two two half centimeters away from the surface and then you
add this material to the top of the pot what this will do is it'll kind of pack in and it'll form a
bit of a matrix that dries relatively quickly and doesn't allow seeds to germinate if you've got um
say you got fire wheat in your pot and you broke off the fire wheat but you still have a piece of
that parsnip in the in the bottom of the pot and then you put this on top it's going to go right
through but if you're starting out with a clean media and then you put this on you're looking at
90 percent reduction in weeds uh for 24 months and i'm not i'm not being over if you if you do
it properly where people run into problems is sometimes you know that they've got the
the soil kind of pushed up around the edges of the container so they have two and a half
centimeters and right around the trunk but then they only have this little little bit around the
edges then you can start to get snap weed around the edges that's not what i mean it has to be
you know a flat surface and then you put two and a half centimeters of material on there
you're looking at a huge reduction in in weeding really some of my very favorite ones
this product is called c fiber and it's quite black because it has has gone through quite
a bit of heating process and and uh again to remove all the oils because cedars have
a lot of allopathic properties to their oils but or which killed plants
but this material is made up of cedar park and it is very very resistant to decay so this
material although not as maybe resilient as that chunky core i was showing you in the beginning
can last for three years in a pot and have a very little little effect on its on on its growing
so that's a our finer fraction of c fiber
and this is essentially the same same material except you'll get pieces of wood in it
the pieces of wood of course the larger the pot they aid in the drainage of the material but this
material when mixed our most popular nursery product is called our 5050 mix which is 50
c fiber and 50 one of those fractions so you can have a 50 50 mix of 3 8 or you can have
a 50 50 mix of of one inch but that um what people are are finding is that the material
is so stable you can plant a tiny plant in a large pot rather than a tiny plant in a big one
potting it up potting it up so if you have space you can take a small pot and put it or a plant
and put it in a larger pot and then just wait and you eliminate the labor of the transplant
we ran out of almost ran out of peat last year so
we have of course spatial spatial problems so we ended up stacking our feet five high in order to
accommodate enough material so now we should have enough material for at least a year and
a half rather than just enough for a year or not even quite a year and then we had to buy
during the same year so in theory if we had uh hope not we had another you know situation
where pete was difficult to get we would be able to have a little bit more of a buffer
um that comes from saskatchewan and we get pete from alberta so alberta in saskatchewan
that is an absolute mountain of pete it's a mountain of feet
that's actually the machine that we use to stack it because it has a telescopic arm on it
you can reach in yeah we don't do it like the egyptians with slaves
that's it for my tour of sumas grow media and i just wanted to take this time at the end of
the video to especially thank burt bischoff for his time in taking me around the site and all
of his generosity and sharing his knowledge with us it was a fantastic tour there was a
lot of topics that we that we covered and i had to chop it down just a little bit to fit within
the confines of a youtube video and there were some sections i couldn't use because of
machine noise and everything else but again super generous of him to share his knowledge with us
if you are a professional grower in our area i can highly recommend that his professional
soil mixing that company sumas chrome media they've always done really really well for me
all right thanks so much for watching if you have any questions please drop those down
into the comments below the video and i'll see what i can do to help