When I got up this morning I found my roommate sitting at the kitchen table eating what I thought was a bowl of cereal. As I began to make coffee and tell him what a drunken jerk he had been last night I recalled that we had no cereal. When I looked at the bowl I recognized that what he was eating was the vermiculite that I keep in a large Tupperware container for indoor gardening use. He had found it, assumed that it was some kind of Rice Krispy - like breakfast cereal and had put milk and tons of sugar on it. At that point he had finished most of the bowl. Being a grouchy, hung-over jerk he refused to believe me, try as i did, that it wasn't breakfast cereal and finished it. I think the stuff is pretty much inert but I'm no doctor. Should I take him to the ER? Call poison control? At this point he has gone back to bed and is snoring loudly as usual.
Common ingredients: Peat, perlite, vermiculite, sand, coconut coir, compost, topsoil. Potting soil varies with the use. There are soilless potting media that are very light in weight, easy for roots to penetrate and free of insects and disease. Potting mixes that contain garden topsoil provide larger plants more stability because they are heavier. Bagged potting media containing garden soil will be pasteurized to kill pathogens. Topsoil will be amended with compost and coarse sand or perlite and vermiculite to make it lighter less likely to compact. Coir is shredded coconut hull fiber. Topsoil, consists of 93% mineral and 7% bioorganic substances. The mineral portion of dirt is roughly equal parts clay, sand, silt. A soilless potting mix will have sphagnum peat moss, perlite, sand, or vermiculite but no soil or compost.
