Long before there was Tezula, long before Mix #100 had a number, and certainly long before I knew I would one day be writing about potting media, there were African Violets on the windowsills of my childhood home in Africa.
My mother and grandmother loved Gesneriads.
African Violets, Gloxinia, Sinningia, Episcia, Streptocarpus. They grew them beautifully. Looking back, some of their African Violets were absolutely mind-blowing.
And I barely cared! I was obsessed with orchids, it was all I could think about and I am pretty sure my art teacher thought I was a complete loon because you could ask me to draw a halloween setting and I would still find a way to squeeze my favorite orchids into it!
While they were growing these colorful little plants around the house, I had complete tunnel vision for orchids. Gesneriads were simply part of the scenery of my childhood. I knew them because they were always there, but I never imagined they would become important to me decades later.
Funny how life works.
Years later, after Tezula existed and potting media had become a considerably larger part of my life, a friend who commercially grew African Violets came to us with a problem.
He wasn't happy with the ready-to-use mixes available to him.
He wanted something different.
And he had one absolute requirement:
No peat.
That sounds relatively straightforward today. It wasn't quite so straightforward when we started.
Peat had become so deeply associated with African Violet culture that removing it wasn't simply a matter of finding another ingredient and swapping it in.
The question became more interesting:
If we stopped trying to imitate a traditional African Violet mix, what would we build instead?
We began thinking about the root environment itself.
Gesneriads such as African Violets appreciate consistent moisture, but their roots still need oxygen. Many growers also use bottom watering and wick-watering systems, which means the substrate needs to move water through capillary action rather than simply absorb it where water happens to touch it.
So we needed moisture retention.
We needed air.
We needed structure.
And we needed water to move.
Those requirements don't always cooperate with one another.
That challenge produced what we eventually started calling the family recipe.
By this point, I was fortunate enough to be working alongside Dr. Y, an extraordinarily experienced, retired commercial soil formulator.
Dr. Y is, in reality, so much more than that description suggests. But she wishes to enjoy her retirement in peace and has asked us to remain intentionally vague about her background and career. We respect that.
What I can say is this: we could not have accomplished a fraction of what we have without her. To this day, she continues to work quietly alongside us, sharing a lifetime of knowledge and experience that has shaped many of the mixes we make today.
Eventually, mom received a phone call the family recipe landed in front of her.
She looked at it and essentially told us that it was good, but with a few changes she thought she could take it from great to spectacular.
That is a dangerous thing to say to someone who is already emotionally attached to a formula!
But we handed it over.
And oh boy, did she deliver.
Instead of changing the fundamental philosophy of the mix, she refined the relationships between its components.
Tree fern fiber became the structural foundation. But this isn't the coarse, wiry tree fern material many longtime growers may picture. The material we use is light, fluffy and much closer in physical consistency to peat (only sustainably harvested and way better than peat!)
Buffered coconut coir became another part of the moisture-distribution network.
Perlite created larger air spaces.
Vermiculite increased moisture retention and contributed additional nutrient-holding capacity.
A modest amount of worm castings introduced an organic component.
Biochar added another persistent, porous material to the system.
None of these ingredients is particularly remarkable simply because it exists in a bag.
The proportions are what make the formula.
The finished mix is predominantly tree fern fiber and coconut coir, creating a continuous fibrous matrix capable of holding and distributing moisture. Vermiculite adds further water retention, while perlite interrupts that moisture-holding matrix with larger pores that help preserve air around the roots.
That relationship is the heart of Mix #100.
There was one characteristic we were unwilling to treat as an afterthought.
Wicking.
African Violet growers have been using wick-watering systems for generations. A substrate designed specifically for these plants should acknowledge how they're actually grown.
Wicking requires something different from simply being "moisture retentive."
Water has to travel.
The substrate needs enough interconnected small pores and fibrous pathways for capillary forces to pull water away from the wick and distribute it through the container.
But there is a catch.
Make that network too fine or too dense and you can sacrifice the very air space the roots need.
So Mix #100 evolved around an interesting contradiction:
Hold water, move water, but leave room for air.
That became the balancing act, and it took 33 attempts before Dr. Y finally said we were done. Honestly, I thought we'd nailed it by version 17, but I stayed out of her way and trusted her. Seeing finished plants grown in version 17 beside version 33 made me very glad I did. Sometimes there's a big difference between good enough and well done.
A formula can look wonderful on paper and perform beautifully in our greenhouse, but our conditions are only one set of conditions in one part of the country.
So we gave it away.
Trial batches went to experienced Gesneriad growers across different growing zones, environments, plants, and watering styles. We wanted them to find the weaknesses.
Instead, the feedback exceeded anything we expected.
It maintained moisture.
Roots moved through it readily.
And, importantly, the substrate didn't have to become a dense mass to accomplish those things.
Before long, we found ourselves producing it for commercial growers around the country.
And yet, strangely, it still wasn't an official Tezula product.
That's probably the strangest part of the story.
Mix #100 has existed for years.
We've made it for growers.
We've made custom batches.
We've watched people use it.
We've refined it.
We've made a ton of it.
But we never formally introduced it as part of the permanent Tezula collection.
In some ways, that seems appropriate.
This wasn't a product conceived because we needed another SKU.
It started because a grower had a problem.
Its underlying philosophy was influenced by plants that had been sitting on the windowsills of my family home decades earlier.
Then another generation of growers challenged it.
Then a soil scientist refined it.
Then commercial growers tested it.
The formula evolved because each person in that chain contributed something to it.
There is something wonderfully circular about finally releasing this mix.
As a kid, I walked past African Violets every day because I was too busy looking at orchids.
Decades later, I'm thinking about the size of the pores surrounding their roots.
My grandmother would probably find that hilarious.
What began on those windowsills eventually collided with commercial growing, substrate science, tree fern fiber, coir, perlite, vermiculite, wick systems, grower trials and years of quietly making batches for people who asked for them.
And somewhere along that path, the family recipe became Mix #100.
It is peat free.
It is airy.
It holds moisture.
It wicks.
But those are specifications.
The part I like most is considerably simpler:
This mix has a family tree.
And after a very long journey, it's finally part of the family again.
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What do you get when you give a retired plant guru her dream project…? If you said “a whole bunch more work for yourself,” well, you’d be spot on! :)
Hi, I'd like to buy one of your Dreamweaver x Necromancer!