New Zealand - Sourcing Gardening Supplies and Ingredients for Mel's Mix

I've been meaning to write this post for a while and just never found the time!  I thought it might be helpful to others in the Shaky Isles putting together an SFG setup to see what this newbie ended up doing.  I'll be the first to state that my MM was probably not the best it absolutely could have been (due to my compost-finding abilities), and also giving credit where credit's due I must point out that many of the sources came from sanderson -- huge thanks to you once again

Nevertheless:

• Peat.  I was lazy and went with the product mentioned by sanderson, Yates Hauraki Gold, so I have no idea whether there are other peats currently available here.  Mitre10 sell it in 100-litre and 50-litre bales.  I needed 430 litres of MM so went with the 100 litre expecting not to need it all, but found that it didn't actually fluff up and only did about 85-90 litres.  Fortunately Yates stood behind their product when I visited them in Onehunga and gave me a second bale, which I used nearly all of.  I found it was easy to wet; when mixing batches of my MM (I was only able to do 60 litres per day) I spread out the peat on my tarp, sprinkled fairly liberally with water, then hand-mixed till it was all a nice dark colour, adding extra water when necessary.
  
• Vermiculite.  Once again I went with the product sanderson mentioned, Exfoliators Australia's coarse vermiculite.  EasyGrow sell this in 100-litre bags.
  
• Composts.  For my ~140 litres of compost I bought 17 litres of vermicast from MyNoke (again from sanderson), a "big bag" of Kings Organic Compost (see below), 70 litres of Zoo Doo (also, see below), and about 15 litres of leaf mould which I was fortunate to have been making for years behind my carport.
  

Kings Organic Compost: for some unknown reason the original 40-litre bag only did 4 or 5 batches, so in the middle of my big push getting the MM mixed I had to go and get a second one to finish the bed.  I don't know why the volume wasn't enough -- since I was making the MM in a series of batches I carefully calculated and measured all my ingredients so they'd all be pretty similar.  I also wasn't very impressed with this material; I picked out many, many small pieces of plastic, and even found larger things e.g. a short length of wire in it!!

Zoo Doo: before ordering I rang and spoke with the manufacturers to make sure the manure was properly composted and to find out about the "aged bark fines" which they add.  In fact the manure only makes up 40% of the finished product, so 70 litres gave me around 20% manure in my finished MM.  The aged bark fines are a potting mix "starter" from a local nursery, with no added pumice, peat etc in it so I counted this towards my plant-based proportion.  Unfortunately Zoo Doo in Auckland is phasing out their operations (from what the guy said I was surprised to see they are still accepting orders even today).


I also looked into making trellises as recommended in ANSFG, but found that both galvanised conduit and PVC structures were going to cost around $200 to put together.  Cattle panels, of the type often used by folks on these fora, don't seem to exist here but the good news is that Bunnings sell a number of products which are kind-of like cattle panels and not prohibitively expensive:

• Composting Cage, a series of 4 panels which you "zip" together with provided spiral thingies (if interested I recommend you go and look at this product in person -- the measurements I wrote down are not making sense )
  
• Whites Flower Mesh, 1.2mm diameter wire, 5cm mesh, 90cm tall and 5m long
  
• There is also a 10m long version of the same thing
  
• Jack Grip and Grow, 1m x 1.8m with 20cm mesh and quite a thick wire
  
• Also in the Trade section they have the sort of mesh that goes into concrete pads, 1.95m x 0.9m
  

Because I need to protect the bed from tree roots I ended up getting an acrylic panel to put under it.  Bunnings again, sell a 1200x1200 one, but I ended up paying a little more for a custom-cut version from Cambrian Plastics, partly because my bed's footprint is bigger than 1200x1200 but also because I wanted the panel to come out a few cm on each side to make it easier to check for invading roots.  Note that I don't know if the Bunnings version is food-safe or not: I was in the process of investigating when I discovered the Cambrian product (which is food-safe), and ordered instantly!


Hopefully this is helpful to someone...

Bless you for taking the time to share this information in one concise thread.

My pleasure, I told you I'd do it when I could   And these fora are so incredibly helpful and supportive, I want to give back when I can!

Very helpful!  Thanks!