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  1. #1
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    Join Date
    Dec 2012
    Location
    Riviera, TX
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    5

    Make clay grow media myself?

    I was wondering if anyone had anything they could offer in the way of information on home made LECA type material. I have all the clay I could ever want and was thinking of making a kiln to fire the clay. I am not sure, however, if there are any methods I could use to make the clay porous or if I had to seal the clay in any way before or after firing. Has anyone ever tried this themselves? Or does anyone have any ideas? So far I thought about possibly....using a melon baller and scooping them out individually, making a half sphere mold and filling/punching it out, or making long clay "ropes" and cutting the ropes into small pieces.

    Before anyone tells me how long it would take to make a grow media myself and how much effort I would have to expend, let me just say that I live on a farm in the country. Here I have a lot of time and limited resources, so I am trying to do the most that I can with minimal purchases. Thus, I am exploring the idea of making my own grow media. Any information would be greatly appreciated!

  2. #2
    Members
    Join Date
    Dec 2011
    Posts
    7
    Just in case anyone stumbles across this old thread...

    I was wandering around the internet as I tend to do, and found myself mentioned in this thread. <wave emoticon>

    The goat dung scoria was only a small sample (half a cup) made in my household wood burning heater (turns out that's not recommended if you are married). The goat dung was there to provide organic material that would be burnt out in the firing process leaving a stack of holes and an increase in surface area. A better alternative if you live in the modern world would be sawdust as someone mentioned. Also as mentioned, this would not be an inexpensive way to make media unless you lived in an area with a lot of clay and a lot of firewood. Goat dung is full of un-digested organic matter like grass, twigs, rose thorns, hand rails... whatever

    I've been a potter for a few zillion years, and noticed something that might be of interest in my early days as the mixer of clays.

    When you mix clay in a mechanical mixer, and dont add quite enough water, you tend to get little balls forming.

    A cement mixer would probably work.

    The size of the balls seemed to correlate with the amount of water (or lack there of)

    If you dug clay out of the ground that was pretty dry, put it into a cement mixer with some sawdust (I'm guessing 1 part sawdust to 3 parts clay by volume - but who knows) and gradually add water until it formed the correct size balls, it might... might ... be an inexpensive way to make a media if you couldn't source it from anywhere else.

    Pile it all up mixed in with an absurd amount of wood and make a huge bonfire, and you will easily reach the temperatures required to fire it and burn out all the organic material.

    The reason the original goat dung scoria was made was actually just a test of a thing I call "the invention engine" which is a process I've been developing to solve problems. Someone on a forum said they had zero access to media as they were in a[n] African village miles away from a store (or something), so I dragged out the invention engine to see what I could come up with using only locally sourced materials.

    It was never intended to be used where suitable media could be bought, and even then was borderline useful at best. More of a thought exercise really.

    Having said that, I'd love to know if anyone ever made any media themselves using any technique.


    -BullwinkleII
    Last edited by 120ThingsIn20Years; 10-07-2018 at 12:03 AM. Reason: vowels forcing me to use "an" rather than "a"
    I'm in year two of attempting to learn, and blog about, 120 things in 20 years, aquaponics was my first "thing".

    My skills include being able to move slowly forward in time, and if I really concentrate, I can sometimes tell what I'm thinking.

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