I agree with your assessment Roger and we do indeed use the agricultural source material, it is the only means by which farmers in the Scottish Highlands have any hope of raising pH levels, however on several soil types, e.g our sandy gravels leaching is pretty rapid. Offering the suggestion for Jan's clay is the only practical suggestion which occurs to me given that the situation in Eastern Europe in terms of product accessibility is quite someway behind the ease that those of the North American and Western European Gardener's can achieve. We often forget how pampered we are in terms not just of availability but costs too. Iain -- I am using the free version of SPAMfighter. We are a community of 6 million users fighting spam. SPAMfighter has removed 68009 of my spam emails to date. Get the free SPAMfighter here: http://www.spamfighter.com/len/ The Professional version does not have this message