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Problem for me is they are all on the top shelf and everything underneath gets drenched.

Just use your 'foe' button & never see an unwanted post again

Perhaps we should think outside the box a bit ?
When I first started growing cacti in the early 70s I inherited a few plants from my mum which were growing in compost that she had made herself in the 1940s. This was a mixture of heavy Sussex loam from the garden, coarse sand, crushed brick lime mortar and charcoal. The plants had been growing in this for years in clay pots without ever being repotted and were pretty healthy considering, particularly the lithops. When I repotted them in my youthful enthusiasm the compost seemed to be mostly inorganic presumably as the clay had slowly been washed away over the years.
Conversely my school friend had a flourishing pot of Rebutia and Echinopsis which were growing in pure Kentish soil from the garden, no added grit or even a drainage hole.
Maybe we don’t need John Innes or his substitutes at all?

I bought a bag of Sylvagrow John Innes No2 100% peat-free this week and thought I'd post up some details in case it's of any use. It's a 15L bag and cost £4.99 but they had a deal for a couple of quid off if you buy three. I've been using Sylvagrow multi-purpose peat free for years now and I've found that to be really good so I had high hopes for this stuff.

First impression out of the bag was surprisingly good. Nice texture, no fungus, not too much in the way of sticks and stones. The compost clumps up when squeezed but then crumbles again nicely.


I chucked a few scoops through a riddle, as I do with most composts these days, and a fair bit of woody material was removed to be added to the bag of multipurpose. I've seen a lot worse though.

I mixed some of the sieved compost 50/50 with Melcourt's smaller sized potting grit and filled one pot with this mix and one with straight sieved compost. Both pots had a broken crock in the base but no weed barrier or similar to catch the soil.

I then watered them thoroughly which resulted in a bit of a decrease in volume and a bit of material washed out the base. The woody material floated and covered the top of the soil but poking a finger in reveals that the 'loam' element is qute sludgy and clayey underneath. In the pot with the extra grit the woody material will probably end up working it's way to the top without a top-dress of gravel to keep it down.


I've left the pots on a sunny shelf in the greenhouse to see how quickly they dry out. I'm fairly happy to use this for alpines and some succulents though. I'll be adding a weed membrane type material to the bottom of my pots to help retain the finer materials. It's certainly better quality than some of the peat John Innes mixes I've bought recently and my initial impression is mostly positive and reassures me that peat-free can be a viable future.

Looks quite reasonable. Do they do an ericaceous one?

ralphrmartin wrote: ↑Mon May 23, 2022 4:32 pm Looks quite reasonable. Do they do an ericaceous one?

I've just bought the ericaceous one Ralph, will do a summary once I get it opened.

@wildedges, great write-up, thankyou!

Here is a quick review of the Sylvagrow Ericaceous Compost.
It's a big bag- 50 litres.
At first glance it looks full of sticks. But there is a lot of pretty good composted material in there and the texture feels like it should. I don't have a suitable griddle at present but I think once the bigger sticks are removed it will be fine.
There is no loam in this; it is entirely compost. So after griddling I plan to add sterilised loam and some sand to it and see where we are at.

Thanks Paul. My hunt for a soil based Ericaceous JI replacement continues...

Let me know if you find one Ralph. Not convinced by the above but I guess time will tell.

Just an update to my compost write up:
48 hours later and the pot with the gritty compost is still slightly damp. There's no plant in there so it's just drying out on a sunny shelf in the greenhouse in a porous pot. The compost with no grit has started to go very solid which says a lot about the clay content. Definitely not a compost to use on its own. It suggests that the larger bits of wood are intentional to break things up a bit but you'd still be battling to stop the lighter material from separating and floating while watering.