Big news from A.R. Plante Organics.
We are now taking orders for our 2 yard sling bags of our two proprietary potting mixes. Orders can be placed directly with us or through our distribution partner Progressive Grower.
A little background on who we are we are the largest OMRI Listed organic compost producer in Massachusetts and now the second largest OMRI Listed product lineup in the region, second only to Coast of Maine Organics.
Here’s what we are offering.
Plante’s First Leaf™
Built on our ¼" OMRI Listed compost blended with OMRI Listed rice hulls, biochar, and peat. This one has a little more peat making it a lighter mix ideal for seed starting and young transplants.
Plante’s Deep Root™
Built the same way as First Leaf but with less peat making it a heavier blend. Ideal for up potting, container growing, amending around perennial plantings, and side dressing crops in production.
We pulled perlite out of both mixes and replaced it with OMRI Listed rice hulls, and there are two solid reasons for that.
Rice hulls are a byproduct of the rice milling process a renewable agricultural waste product that would otherwise go unused. Perlite is a mined volcanic glass. From a clean inputs standpoint the choice is straightforward.
As rice hulls slowly break down they release silica into the growing medium. Silica strengthens plant cell walls, supports root development, and encourages microbial activity in the soil around them. Unlike perlite which never breaks down and contributes nothing back, rice hulls are actively working for your soil as they decompose.
The biochar we blend in comes from the milling industry right here in Maine. Wood waste from the milling process is chipped and then put through a pyrolysis process heating the material at high temperatures in a controlled oxygen free environment which converts it into biochar. Like our rice hulls, this is another material that starts as an industrial byproduct and gets put back to work doing something genuinely valuable for the soil.
That porous carbon structure biochar creates becomes habitat for the microbial communities already living in our active OMRI Listed compost. Those microbes colonize the biochar and establish themselves within it so by the time you move a seedling from the mix into the field, high tunnel, or container, you are not starting from zero. You are bringing an already developing biological system with you into that root zone.
That’s the difference between filling a pot and building a living system.
We are also now stocking 2 yard sling bags of our 80/20 compost biochar blend ideal for smaller production tunnel applications at a spread rate of approximately 1 yard per 1,000 square feet.
If you have received grant funding around biochar soil amendments we are the only company in Massachusetts doing full in house blending operations and the only one producing a blend that is 100% OMRI Listed. We can blend to any NRCS specification with a minimum order of 50 yards on custom mixes.
Call or email us for pricing. 
(508) 807-7210
[email protected]
www.ARPLANTEMATERIALS.com
Plante with the Best!