HB - Regardless of your water source, you are going to have to adjust the pH of your water each and every time you add it to your soil. Get used to it! pH is really one of the most important factors in growing healthy plants that properly use the nutes you give them, so give pH a real high priority.

Tap water has stuff in it that is beneficial to your plants - trace minerals and such. If you take these things out of the water, you need to replace them with special additives, which is an added expense. There should be a reason for not using tap water. In other words, there is something wrong with your tap water. 8.5 pH is not something wrong, it's something that needs to be adjusted. Anyway, the pH of bottled water is all over the charts - there's nothing constant about it.

The mfgr's website for FloraNova should tell you what kinds of mediums it's good for. There's some real good info about different mediums in the link I gave you above. You really should read Stinky's thread. She has a simple, and cheap, recipe for soil that is a proven winner.

PC :smokin: