Has anybody tried 'Stay Moist'?

(This thread is in the Non-SFG gardening forum.)

I'm in the middle of a non-gardening project that calls for Stay Moist, and I hadn't heard of it before. I'm just wondering if anyone has used it in their pots or boxes.

It's a polymer crystal that absorbs and releases water similar to vermiculite. It's supposed to be biodegradable and non-toxic.

One pound of the product was $14 delivered to my door. At the recommended application, that amount covers 100 sf. The price is 1% of what I pay for vermiculite. (The cost of vermiculite in the PNW seems to be higher than in most of the rest of the country.)

I have no interest in using it in my boxes. I was just curious if anyone had tried it in any gardening application, and what their results were.

http://www.soilmoist.com/products/soil-moist.php

I grew tomatoes in a large indoor planter using water beads in the mix. It grew to be about 2 feet tall and had several flowers when my husband set the plant outside on a hot day and left it there.

It was dead before I noticed.

I have a similar product here in the UK , I'm using it in all six of our hanging baskets it's been there for just over a year and still seems to be working .

I also used it in the seven or so tomato tubs last year & other green house tubs ... it does hold the water well , a single crystal can swell up to a half inch dollop of jelly .

In these tubs I activated it first by using a weak solution of baby bio house plant food for feed purposes & gently worked the jellified blobs in the top inch or so of the tubs. It was still showing as jelly when I cleand the tubs out in early November .

My reason for using it was I went on holiday for a while and left the auto watering system on a very low level to come on at 04.30 hrs each morning .

I hoped that the water given from the auto system would be held till used by the plants during the day if it ever became too hot in the glass house . It sees to have worked for when we came back we had toms , aubergenes and capsicum peppers .

It sounds like it worked well for you mixing it in on top.

The directions on this product are emphatic that the stuff be worked in at a depth of 3-4 inches, closer to the root zone.

My reasoning was that the use of MM will distribute the moisture out of the top gel reserviors .
I would have had to have mixed it in with the initial charge to the baskets & tubs to get it that deep , to try and do it with growing plants would seem me damage the roots unless i trickled it dry down man made holes using a 1/2" steel bar.

One thing that has made me think abit is that a fair amount of water held in suspension in a basket /tub may start some form of funcal/bacterial rot .

To see the possibilities of what may happen I've got a 4 pint jug of reconstitured gel crystals sat out on my potting bench . It's been ther nearly three months & has turned green with algae but as yet nothing else seems to ahve occurred to the small particles of MM that's mixed in with it.

I started using it in 2003 when I took a container (flowers) course at a community college in the Chicago area. Although not the total answer, it helped. A lot of my pots survived better than when not using it. I want to combine soil moist with using compost tea and see if the boost in water retention and added nutrients will help in the baking heat here in NC

Kay

I use it in my upside down tomato planters. I mix it throughout the potting mix. We get so much wind that these plants were drying out too quickly. The soil moist seems to retain the moisture longer.