I stumbled upon a few mineral based soil additives last year and it's had me thinking: If Sempervivum are from the mountains where erosion is common and topsoil is sparse, then wouldn't they likely respond well to mineral amendments?
Using too much compost can cause rot in sempervivum and so I'm looking for other ways to try and give my semps a boost, if anyone is familiar with mineral soil amendments I'd love to hear your opinions on this.
So far I've seen several different types of amendments.
Some, like "glacial dust", and "volcanic wonder dust" do not boast a ph or an npk rating, instead they vaguely describe the potential benefits of various minerals. Some like iron I've imagined could benefit semps, but others like manganese and silica I wouldn't think could help much and other minerals listed like lamproite I'm completely unfamiliar with. These additives often reference a volume of contents without listing specific elements, like a statement that says "this product contains over 60 different minerals", some also make allusions to "natural vermiculite".
Some also boost calcium.
Other mineral additives seem to be more about ph adjusting, like limestone, plaster, dolomite sand. We've had the discussion about ph and semps on the forum before but I think the conclusion was that they do well in both acidic and basic soil so that's less interesting to me, what I am curious about is whether these might have other benefits besides ph.
Some like baked clay, turface akedama, horticultural sands, various gravels and pumice, seem to be more about adjusting drainage. Anyone trying to engineer specialized soil for sempervivum knows how important drainage is, that's not really what I'd like to discuss in his thread, but I am curious if any of those sorts of additives also add beneficial nutrients as a side effect.
On a final note, I once read sempervivum are salt tolerant, not that I'm sold on the idea yet. However I could see how salts might stave off some of the bacteria that cause rot in sempervivum. Some of the mineral additives reference "beneficial salts" which isn't really something I understand, are there different kinds of salts? Other materials (even some organic ones like coco peat and oyster shells) have the potential to introduce residual salt into the soil. In my experience salt kills plants so I've always been averse to anything that might have it, but if adding some beach sand to the soil won't hurt the semps and will help prevent rot I'd be tempted to give it a shot. I know there are some forms of succulents which grow on the coast, so I suppose it might be possible that salt could be benign or even beneficial to sempervivum, but I have major doubts.
Anyways I just wanted to open the topic for discussion. Up to this point I've only used compost and fertilizer to speed up my plant's growth, just curious if anyone has tried mineral supplements to speed things along.
-Sol Zimmerdahl
