Reptile & Amphibian Forums

- how long can moss last...cause i heard you can just put it in the oven to kill all the bacteria/mold, and then reuse it.

...if you look near the bottom of the page in the forum you'll see a thread about mold help.

In it me and Jeff went back and forth a bit but bottom line is that heat is a major disinfectant and that microwaves and other things can disinfect in additional ways also.

If it was something more heat tollerant like wood I would say microwave or oven should be fine if you watch excess moisture in the microwave and flamability in the oven.

Given your talking about moss I would suggest soaking it in water and then microwaving it for a good amount of time. The heat from the steaming moisture will kill allot of things and most of what remains will be killed by the radiation.

If you want to check the previous thread here's it's link

http://forums.kingsnake.com/view.php?id=1253104,1253104

On a side note if you are using sphagnum moss then you might check your local nurseries bulk supply(be sure to describe it so they don't direct you to a ground up compressed form) and see if it's quality is sufficient. The nursery arround the corner from me sells slightly compressed 1ft x 1ft x 1ft bales for about $12. So it is more efficient for me to just throw away any moldy/dirty moss.

Hope this helps,

Sean