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By DesertLlama
Posts:  96
Joined:  Fri Mar 06, 2020 9:08 am
#349820
I'm planning on buying some pings to put in a south window and wanted to make sure I made a decent media mix. I'm in a hotter/drier climate so I plan on a slightly wetter mix (2:1:0.5-1 perlite/peat/sand. I understand they appreciate slightly alkaline soils so I went out and bought this calcium carbonate sand meant for reptiles:

https://www.petsmart.com/reptile/substr ... 55936.html

It looks an awful lot like coral sand. I wonder how I should balance the calcium content to prevent the plants from burning. Has anyone used this kind of sand and what were your results? Should I probably be more conservative with how much I put into the mix? Thanks!
By DesertLlama
Posts:  96
Joined:  Fri Mar 06, 2020 9:08 am
#350073
jeff wrote: Sat Mar 14, 2020 12:33 pm what pings species do you want to grow ?
first of all if you want to be sure of yourself, make substrate tests on garden ping like x'Sethos' x 'Tina' and others of the same type
I bought two Aphrodite which is another common and easy grower, right? I guess I could try one plant in my proposed mix and another with less or no sand?
By DesertLlama
Posts:  96
Joined:  Fri Mar 06, 2020 9:08 am
#350150
jeff wrote: Sun Mar 15, 2020 10:32 am x 'Aphrodite' is a hybrid from agnata x moctezumae
mine are in calcareous substrate ;)
Does that substrate include added lime like I've seen in recommendations or do you happen to use another source of calcium?

I bought the pet store calcium sand to more or less kill two birds with one stone. I'm trying to avoid buying both inert sand and some calcareous soil additive as well. Call me lazy I guess. :lol:
By twitcher
Posts:  656
Joined:  Sat Aug 25, 2018 5:56 am
#350191
Not an expert, but I can tell you how I answered this question. When looking for a calcium addition to my ping media, I looked at a number of options. I did look at calcium sands for reptiles. Some of them mentioned that the substrate was soluble so it would gradually dissolve if the reptiles swallowed it. I did not use that, as my reasoning was that I did not want something that would dissolve in the mix. I was looking for some limited calcium availability in the media, but since it was going to be wet a good bit of the time, I did not want something that would "easily" dissolve. I settled on aragonite. While it does dissolve, the rate is apparently slow unless the media gets to be fairly acid. I understand that it does help to buffer pH, keeping it from getting too high. It is for that reason that I try to keep my utrics and sundews out of the same trays as the pings, since utric and sundew mixes typically are acid (using peat). Having said that, I only use a token amount of aragonite in my ping mixes. Calcium carbonate is apparently less soluble than aragonite in water, but I was unable to find a clean source of calcium carbonate at the time and now I have the aragonite. So far, I have not noticed any significant changes with using the aragonite.

As my experience with (mexican) pings grows, I have been moving more and more to mineral based, chemically neutral, clearly non-soluble media, but I occasionally cheat when I identify a variety that responds better to wetter conditions, using peat in the mineral mix or just plain lfsm for a few of them. But I am still very much a beginner.

Having said all of that, I would probably go with calcium carbonite sand if I had to do it all over again, but still limit the amount in the mix. Hopefully others with more experience with pings and with more knowledge of minerals will chime in and show a better way . I'm also using a fair amount of silica sand now (couldn't find a clean source initially either).

BTW, I have started to use perlite in some of my mixes. and I really hate perlite!
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By jeff
Posts:  566
Joined:  Wed Sep 27, 2017 1:41 pm
#350197
for my part I use as a base for all my calcic pings, the cat litter (not clumping and unscented;based on attapulgite or sepiolite) with a lot of others minerals (for aeration, water retention, strengthening the notion of limescale and capillarity) and it has worked very well for many years ;) .
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