A look into Sure To Grow’s hot growing medium:

For those not familiar with Sure To Grow, allow me to enlighten. Plastic bottles are recycled and reconstituted into a growing medium that is Sure To Grow (STG). The medium feels light and fluffy. You can purchase it in any form factor that you need: sheets, blocks, loose-fill, and pre-formed cones for net pots (2″ seedling pucks up to 10″ for 2-gallon buckets).

In contrast to other mediums, raw materials are not utilized in the creation of Sure to Grow. Reduce, recycle, and reuse. Plastic bottles feed Sure To Grow. However, the tradeoff of utilizing raw, virgin ingredients which can be reused vs. waste products which would otherwise be thrown away—-I choose the medium from waste recycled products.

Why is it a great growing medium?

One of the single most important and hard-learned benefits of Sure to Grow—-plant resiliency. During the 2 years that I’ve been using Sure To Grow, I’ve had root rot occur twice. The roots started in STG popped back almost instantly. No other medium that I tried worked this well.

The reason why this occurred is that the roots were protected in the bubble that is Sure To Grow. With Hygromite (diatomaceous earth) and Hydroton (clay pebbles), root rot affected the roots up to the root ball. With Sure To Grow, root rot stopped at the medium. After trimming the foliage and affected roots, roots took 4x as long to restore with Hygromite and Hydroton than with Sure To Grow.

With STG, the entire plant didn’t have to start rerooting from scratch. The new rooting started right from the edge of the medium. BAM! Almost. . .insta-re-rooting.

Here we have a couple of pics of plants that suffered from root rot.  These shots are after 1 week and 2 weeks, respectively, from Sure to Grow in Current Culture H2O’s 4XL system.

Transplantability. Say you start your plant in dirt, or any other medium and you want to change it up. You can repot your plant into STG. You carve out a suitable cavern inside STG and insert your plant.

Transplant from dirt? Impossible, you say! Possible, says I. Sure To Grow functions as a micro-filter. Wash away what soil that you can, carve out a suitable pocket—without permeating the medium’s shell—and you have a nice home for your previously soil-based plant. The soil will not flow out of the STG to muck up your growing system. Except for the normal transplant adjustment, the plants take to it like ducks to water.

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How to improve it?

STG cannot support larger, heavier plants on its own. Unless there is a stiffer superstructure around the medium (i.e. net basket, tomato cage, etc.), a heavy plant will topple in this medium. As plants grow larger, their root structure will firmly hold them in place. I don’t know that it’s possible, but a denser, heavier Sure To Grow would solve this.

Conclusion

For me, perfect growing materials utilize waste from other processes. Compost from kitchen scraps, manure from animals, and garden beds from old railroad ties are all perfect. So is Sure To Grow. Recycled plastic bottles transformed into a growing medium. Awesome!

No virgin rocks or wooly sheep were hurt in the writing of this article.

Happy Gardening!

Curtis