Steve's Garden: September 2009

HYPONEX EXPERIMENT

Born: April 5th, 2009
Died: not yet

Many of you may be aware of what I dubbed my "Hyponex Experiment" plant this year. With the cost of pre-mixed Miracle Gro or another type of pre-mixed good quality potting medium (Pro Mix, etc.), I decided to do an experiment of sorts seeing exactly how bad Hyponex Potting Soil is for growing vegetables. I picked a Jalapeno Early Organic pepper plant to use. It's somewhat common knowledge how substandard the Hyponex soil is, but I wanted to see for myself. It supposedly clumps together easily, has sand in the mix, etc., etc..

A great link that shows its composition & also compares it to 4 other types of soil is below.

Potting Soil Comparison

The 40lb (2 cu ft, I believe) bag of Hyponex is about $1.50-$3.00. The same size bag (if it existed) of a Miracle Gro Potting Mix would be over $20! The 1.5 cu ft bag of MG runs about $10-$15. You can see one of the main reasons for my experiment now. =)

This test lasted about 18 weeks, from the day I put the Jalapeno seedling in the Hyponex until just a few days ago when I took the final picture of it (see pics below).

I found that over the first few weeks, with the same exact feeding & watering regiment as my other Jalapeno plants, that there really was not much, if any, noticeable difference! Probably because the plant still held nutrients from it's previous home/medium. I started to notice it was drying out a good bit quicker than the others, so I about doubled the amount of water it got for the remainder of the experiment. I still, throughout the whole 18 weeks, kept the feeding the exact same as my other Jal plants. After about a month to a month and a half, I started to notice the other Jal's leaving it in the dust so to speak. The Hyponex plant was flowering a lot less, producing slower, producing smaller fruit & looking a good bit less healthy (yellowing). It stayed that way for the rest of the experiment lifetime, eventually even yellowing a good bit more over the last month or so. I probably got about 7-10 total Jalapeno's off the plant, most of which were smaller than Jal's off my other plants (which, on average, have already produced 40-60 Jals a piece).

Summed up, Hyponex provides pretty much no nutrition for a plant at all. It does work well as a good physical supporting medium, as I didn't have to stake the plant. I may have done so for a week or two just to be safe, but it was not necessary. The first few weeks with a plant in this soil with show little to no difference than the same type of plant in a better medium. Over time, the plant in Hyponex will show nutrient deficiencies which cause yellowing, low fruit production, smaller fruit production & possibly other effects as well. I would not reccomend using Hyponex for any plant that doesn't love poor quality soil (for instance, it would work just fine for Nasturtiums, as they prefer poor soil). I believe Hyponex, if supplemented with some type of nutrient rich matter, would be just fine for single season plant growth. In fact, next year I plan to continue this experiment. I will put another Jalapeno plant in a mix of Hyponex and some type of nutrient supplement like compost or whatever.

Below is my original introduction blog post about The "Hyponex Experiment" & a picture life-cycle of the plant. Please let me know what you think. If you have any suggestions for the supplement to use with it next year, keeping in mind it must be cheap as I don't want the cost to add up anywhere close to what a good potting mix would cost. Any other suggestions, comments, questions, or anything I may have left out of this post that you're curious about are welcome. =)

Thanks - Steve

Introduction blog post

PICTURE LIFE CYCLE:

05/12/09 (Date of transplant into Hyponex potting mix):