Nature’s Footprint 650g Coconut Coir (Pack of 5)

I'm glad that I never read the reviews before I started using these coir bricks, which I've now used several times over. Hot water? Seriously? I throw one brick at a time into a trug tub, add a watering can full of cold water, and wait about five minutes before I start mixing. There are always some dry bits that need working on, but you can work out your own method of getting the consistency you want. I use these coir bricks primarily for planters and pots of a temporary nature, e.g. for growing tomatoes and peppers and so on or for the planters in which I tend to put bedding. These are all plants to which I add nutrients in the form of liquid feed and that I water very regularly, so that the growing medium is just that, a growing medium and not the source of food or a reservoir for water. I use coir a lot in my self-watering pots (where I grow veg in my greenhouse) because I find it doesn't get stinky when constantly saturated the way some composts do in self-watering pots, and the roots of the plants tend to spread out nice and evenly through the medium. I usually mix in either some peat-free compost (if I'm using the coir for bedding planters) or some farmyard manure of the kind you can buy bagged in garden centers (if I'm raising vegetables). Trial and error has shown me what the optimum mixture to promote plant growth looks like. I get great results using these coir bricks as a growing medium, and at the end of the season it's easy to remove the plants from the pots. Any spent coir that's left over gets kept for the pots of tulips I plant up at the end of the year, since bulbs contain their nutrients and don't need a nutrient-rich growing medium. Or I'll use it as a soil conditioner elsewhere in the garden as my topsoil is a bit on the heavy side. The bricks are easy to store (in a dry place, of course!) and all round good value for money.

Quick delivery of the item, with the bricks packed tightly together. I've used 3 of them and have the other 3 spare at the moment as you get a surprisingly amount of product when water is added. Perfect for the job.

These are so much easier to deal with than bags of compost, much easier to transport. Has saved hours of blood, sweat, tears and struggling. My other half grows veg for showing and has used these in raised beds and in the buckets he grows his show spuds in and is delighted at the finish on the skins of the spuds - no scab!! Carrots, both long and stump have had a lovely skin finish, and the long parsnips are the best he's grown using this as a medium. This product holds water really well without sogginess and is suitable for all sorts of growing, whether it's in greenhouse pots, containers for flowers, raised beds, and spud buckets or root 'bins.' All you need to do is to adjust the ph if you need to and add your appropriate fertiliser mix. A lot of commercial composts these days are made at least partly from recycled waste, and they're truly dreadful if not made properly, have had no end of problems with disease. This coir, although more expensive is clean, easy to use, and easy to handle, and you have the confidence of knowing that your end product will be clean and well grown.

I had previously used another brand of coir fibre bricks but of a very different size and weight and which is claimed to produce 10 litres of usable product. The seller in that instance suggests using a specific volume of water to hydrate but it usually needs about 20% extra. The seller in this instance provides in the carton a detailed leaflet explaining what coir is and how it can be used but nothing about hydration. A call to the US distributors failed to provide any definitive answer and suggested using 1 to 1.5 US gallons which is far too little, only about one quarter of that realistically required. Experience shows that you need fairly hot, not boiling, water and 3.5 litres is the absolute minimum required but you may need another litre or so added progressively in 250ml doses to ensure that there are no dry portions. If the dry bricks are stored for many months, the product may lose some residual moisture and need even more water for full hydration. With the first brick left overnight in a bucket of 3 litres of moderately hot water, a sizeable dry block remained after 9-10 hours although the wetted coir was excessively damp. Even when sufficient water is added to the bucket used, you may need to break up the block almost layer by layer to help speed the process and then break any remaining small pieces which may be up to 1cm thick and about 10cm across. It should be left to cool before use and probably best rested to allow the moisture to distribute more evenly. Once correctly hydrated, coir is excellent for tray or pot seeding and for cuttings when mixed with vermiculite or perlite and for soil improvement when used alone. Dug into clay soils, it will aid aeration and drainage and dramatically improve soil conditon.

I've tried them all, potting compost and seed compost but the coconut coir is by far the superior medium for pretty much everything. You can sow seeds in this, transplant mature plants into it, add it as a mulch, it's general purpose and my plants love it. Just be aware that it provides no nutrients to plants, you have to mix it with compost or fertilizer but what it does provide is airation to the plants roots and is light enough for seedlings to poke through. It also composts very well. I'd never go back to those expensive bags of compost, this stuff works wonders!