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13 responses total.

honestly, i don't know...

one thing, though...alot of times, the crystalizing comes from something that
is in the water.  is this somethin that you have on other plants, or have 
seen before?

and was the soil the kind that come pre-fertilized?  i usually avoid that 
type, because it's too risky...what if it's not enough or too much...

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I got a bag of Frank's Nursery potting soil that was actually full
of nematodes that hatched about a week after I potted a bunch of
houseplants!  What a mess that was.

My first wife used to put soil on a cookie trays and heat it up in
the oven.  I can't remember how hot it had to be for how long in order
to kill all or most of the undesirables, but that method should work
for the potting soil you buy, too.  Buying your bugs by the bag
doesn't sound like any fun at all, suzi...

uck!  we've had stuff like tha happen, but thankfully they were found 
OUTSIDE the house, before we had a chance to bu the newly potted plants
into the house.  

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potting soil, for some reason, is different then dirt.  potting soil is 
alot denser, and to be perfactly useful, you really ought to add some 
sand to it, so that you don't suffocate your poor plants.  garden variety
dirt is looser, and has all of the good stuff in it.

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wedds are half the fun!  i don't really care if it's steralized or not

I had a coworker say that our office plants were looking like they had a lot
of "salt damage", meaning that salt from watering was building up in the soil
and poisoning the plants.  The solution was to put the whole plant in a sink
and flush a lot of water thru the soil.  The clay pots did have a lot of white
stuff built up on the outside.

Anybody know more?

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The white stuff on the outside of the clay pots, from my understanding
at least, is mineral build up, not just salt <NaCl, table salt>.
It comes from minerals being flushed from the soil and building up on the 
outside of the pot, it seems to happen quicker when I fertilize my plants.

the "salts" and crystalization are the residue from the fertilizer, and as
was mentioned before, flushing it out is a good solution.  By the way,
can be a problem on large scale farming where a great deal of fertilizer
is used.

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