Roger that! THanks veggi, don't know why I didn't think of that. I will post my experiment with the perlite ph testing. I will just run some water through some perlite and test the runoff, then through just the soil. I will post what the results are and then maybe you or some others could help determine if the soil ph is looking good. So far the babies seem to like it and they don't appear to be showing any signs of stress, so maybe this is all worry over nuthin' much. Again in the mean time if anyone else reads this and has any wisdom to add then by all means put your 2 cents in!