Re: Fertilizer Mixture
- To: pumpkins@mallorn.com
- Subject: Re: Fertilizer Mixture
- From: P* <P*@aol.com>
- Date: Sat, 7 Mar 1998 23:34:57 EST
Ron,
Normally you keep the same concentration whether you are putting on 1
gallon or 500 gallons. 500 gallons would be applied to an area that is 500
times bigger. Lets say you were watering a tomato plant with Miracle Gro. You
might find that the plant gets a good drink with a half gallon of solution. It
would do no good to water the plant with 500 gallons of water\ fertilizer
solution, it would float away. That may be a little bit of a ridiculous
example, but anyway. Lets go back to how a root basically works and why it is
counterproductive, if not deadly, to your plant to over fertilize. A plant
will only take up a certain amount of inorganic fertilizer ions(salts). You
can't force the root to take up 3 times the amount of fertilizer than it
needs. How does a root know , how much fertilizer water to take up? A tiny
root hair is made up of tiny cells that act like a membrane. A membrane will
allow water and fertilzer ions to pass through it and get into the plant, if
conditions are right. The ionic concentration must be higher inside the root
cell than outside (in the soil) in order for water to flow from the soil into
the root. So water will flow from a less salty to a more salty area. Now here
is a real example for you. Lets say you had a condom that was not made out of
latex (non permeable)....lets say you had a condom made out of a semi
permeable membrane and you filled it with a solution of 10 tablespoons per
gallon of salt water. Now put that condom into a jar of water that only had 1
tablespoon per gallon of salt in it. You would have a condom filled with very
salty water immersed in a jar of weak salt water. Water would flow from the
less salty water in the jar, through the membrane into the condom. Now if you
switched things around and put the weak salt water solution in the condom and
immersed it in a jar of very salty water, just the opposite would
happen.....water would flow out of the condom into the jar. Always, flow goes
from less salty to more salty. Now that root cell behaves like the condom and
water flows into the root cell the same way. So now we take a watering can
with 20 tablespoons per gallon and soak the roots. You have surrounded the
root with saltier water than there is inside the root. The root says NO WAY
MAN!!!! I'm not going to suck up that salty garbage. So if you overfertilizer
to the point of toxicity, less water will be taken up by the plant or it might
not take up any water at all and croak. A plant may wilt when you've
fertilized the hell out of it because the roots refuse to take up large
quantities of the salty stuff. Now back to the question of 1 tablespoon per
gallon or two, etc. 2 tablespoons per gallon is pretty strong. Sometimes you
are better off to use 1 tablespoon per gallon and water two times with the
weaker mixture. Or a half a tablespoon per gallon every time you water. A
plant will like it better, if it receives a consistant low dose, rather than
getting a big jolt of fertilizer every two weeks. It all gets back to the old
soil test. If you have loaded up your soil with preplant manure and granular
fertilizer, you may need no fertilizer and just plain water. Hope I didn't get
too far out with my examples.
pumkinguy@aol.com
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