EUROPEAN STANDARDISATION OF GROWING MEDIA ANALYSIS - A CRITICAL REVIEW

Standardized methods for the analysis of growing media are of main import-ance both for scientific and advisory work, as they are able to provide comparable results. Despite a decreasing number of active participants, the European Standards Institute (CEN) has issued series of standards covering the most important charac-teristics of substrates, partly adopting methods developed in the course of the European research project “HORIZONTAL”. However, the integration of growing media in the forthcoming EU fertilizer directive may rise the participation and acceptance at least by CEN member countries and improve the possibilities to per-form adequate ring test to provide validation data.