Time for Truth: Do manufactured Nutrients Kill Soil Life

[pop22]

I've been on their site and yes, they are interesting. I'd love to but I need an extra life time or two to grow the seed I have.........lol! And I'm drifting towards real, from the source landrace photo periods, though I'll always grow autos also!

 

[fryge]

I grow mostly organic by choice, and unlike manufactured nutrients, its hard to over do it. Where the problem lies is in people believing more is good and too much is better........ and the canna nute companies are ALL guilty of encouraging such behavior. The ridiculously high nutrient levels I see some people running hydro use, makes me cringe. Besides the fact they are wasting nutrients, the are increasing pollution levels. most could cut their nutes by 40% and likely have a better grow! Same for those using it in soil. We need to teach responsible use of nutrients as when used properly, these issues can be negated.

I agree.
besides growing weed I also like growing vegetables, and I've always treated my weedplants similar to my other plants, it's just a plant after all. I'm not that focussed on getting the highest yield possible, so I have never been tempted to pump it full of fertilizer.
I just mix some chickenshit-pellets into my soil. a few handfulls usually lasts till somewhere in the first half of flowering(outdoor, final pot is 40 litres, I add about a hand of pellets per 10 litres).
I don't give any additional fertilizer unless I see a defficiciency. usually to fix defficiencies I use (liquid) synthetic fertilizer, since it works more quickly(btw, no fancy brand, I just buy cheap liquid fertilizer that the action sells in spring. no need to make it complicated, just check the npk numbers, that's what all fertilizer is after all, with expensive fertilizer you're just paying for the marketing IMO)
and that works fine for me. sometimes I'm surprised online how much people are worrying about nutrients, buying expensive brands with fancy marketing(which are still just NPK) and all kinds of weird products like 'boosters'.
and I often notice that pictures I see online often look close to n-toxicity. maybe it's just because I'm used to lower levels, but the plants I see online often look very dark green, even with shiny leaves. if my plants looked like that I would be worrying about overfeeding. the only time I've ever seen signs of overfeeding was from a particular sensitive plant(cross with a landrace) after repotting into it's final pot.

 

[pop22]

I just dumped the 1 gallon pot that one of the CBD plants was in. Same organic soil I used in all the auto pots for the Blue Dragon the last 3 weeks, I watered it 3-4 times with 650-750 ppms of Seagrow.
I had put EWC in also the rootball was loaded with red worms! I dropped it into the wormbin along with some raw, pumpkin for feed.

 

[BII]

I'd presume that the rather low concentrations of plant nutrients (which are inherently not toxic substances) in feed water, generally with already very dilute liquid nutrient solutions added at a few parts per 1000s, likely are not toxic to soil microbes. You assert that soil microbes "can't grow in them nasty nutrients." That statement seems suspect. If anything, wouldn't adding diverse soluble nutrients increase microbial growth? The nutrients plants need and the low concentrations in "chemical" feed solutions are generally not going to be toxic to other living organisms; and actual "soil microorganisms" are generally going to be pretty robust, so I doubt feeding "chemical" plant food is significantly killing-off soil microbial populations. Don't many soil growers [I grow hydro] sooner or later feed their plants "chemical" nutes, with this not causing severe adverse effects from killing off the soil microbes? If "chemical" nutes were actually nasty/toxic and killed soil microbial populations, wouldn't we all know that, wouldn't it be readily seen and common knowledge; but that's not the case.

I'd presume changing most any physical parameter, such as soil pH or temperature, will have more potential adverse impacts on soil microbial populations than plant nutrient solutions.

Note, EDTA is not an enzyme; it is not a catalyst. If anything, EDTA actually inactivates many enzymes (metalloenzymes) by sequestering metal ions (while also forming ion-chelate complexes, making the ions more water soluble/bioavailable).

 

[AnonymousGrower2]

I bought hydro nutes by accident when getting equipped and i grow in soil ,for 9 mnths ive been useing hydro grow and hydro bloom and ive never had a problem ,ive successfully completed 5 grows and took 2 oz of a clone (documented on here)........just saying [emoji111]

 

[Rev. Green Genes]

The nutes we use today are formulated to be plant available immediately. When used in the proper concentrations and times they will never harm your plant. There are multiple reasons people believe this kind of crap, it is repeated over and over from outdated truths, they do not care to think it through, and soil science is a deep and mysterious hole.

One problem is that people do not understand it the easy way. One way to classify molecules are the two classes of electron donors and electron receptors and they interact in the soil solution and at 'exchange sites' on soil aggregates. The electrical charge of each molecule shifts in real time, and this forms the 'Redox' cycles. At any given pH (pH = sum of H+ cations) a mineral will be oxidized or reduced depending on where the charge goes and this is a pH driven chemical process. From the minerals perspective, all life is the same, always taking electrons.....The microlife in the soil finds it food in this environment, and will 'borrow' nitrogen from the soil and give it back when it dies. As part of the process of Redox. The very enzymes released by plant roots and microlife accelerate or block Redox reactions and this is the foundation of all mineral cycles on Earth. The same process occurs in hydro, if your pH is off than the minerals change form to be plant unavailable by reduction and oxidation reactions.

There is no change in using 'chemical' or 'organic' nutes from a scientific point of view except that they may be in the wrong form for plant uptake. But if you think they the manufacturers have not figured that out by now I'll recall your library card and sentence you to three months of wikipedia.

 

[Rev. Green Genes]

these are the interactions labled as Aerobic Respiration, what is happening in a turned compost pile or slower in soils.

As a side note, this slide also explains why a scientist tells you that if you want to find life, follow the water.

 

[G.Leave]

Interesting!! So this is what I have seen....when its dry out...worms naturally get drawn to the surface at night of wet soil....and watering with full dose chem nutrients like foxfarms at recommended dose did the same thing, it drew the worms to the surface as normal. If it was the least bit toxic, wouldn't they simply avoid the wet chemical earth?

 

[calliandra]

Hey guys, very interesting discussion!
I'm studying soil microbial life at the mo and this is a question I've been thinking about too, so here's my take, not hard data driven, but more of a logical think-through

In natural nutrient cycling, bacteria and fungi mine nutrients out of organic matter, producing enzymes that will "digest" the material they're working on outside their bodies, and then pulling the preprocessed results into their lil bodies. The microfauna (protozoa, nematodes, microarthropods, worms...) then comes along to eat those bacteria and fungi, and the excess nutrients get pooped into the rhizosphere, where the most action is going on, thanks to the exudates the plant is putting out to promote the growth of its little helpers.

That flagellate/amoeba/nematode poo brings nutrients to the soil in pretty much the same form as your random bottle of synthetically produced: they are soluble, so directly available.
The difference is in

• the amounts: they're micromicro, but keep coming all the time, in ways we can never supply to our plants (hm except maybe hydro?)
• the composition: ALL nutrients the plant will ever need - we can't even agree upon which those are! Have you seen a nute bottle containing arsenic? Essential for plant health in tiensytiny amounts, who would've thought!

Both the amounts and composition of synthetic fertilizers have nothing to do with the plant's actual needs, so we are unbalancing the system with excesses of single nutrients when we use them.
Elaine Ingham keeps speaking of a maximum of about 100kg of synthetic fertilizers per acre as the approximate limit, anything above that will disturb and unbalance the ecosystem beyond what it can buffer itself. And she has been successfully restoring soil ecosystems in big ag for many years, sometimes having to wean the land off the synthetics over the course of 1-2 years because no biology could survive in those soils as they are in the beginning...

I have this hunch that one of the mechanisms that leads to the collapse of microbial systems as we are seeing in agriculture has to do with the fact that the microbes themselves will consume those readily available, soluble nutrients, like fast food.
So instead of spending energy on producing those enzymes and mining their nutritional needs from the soil, they just suck up the fast food - and by so doing, actually become competition for the plant where before there was a kindly give and take.

Not taking the enzymatic way then will impact the soil structure: those missing enzymes usually also serve as glues for the formation of microaggregates, then strung together by fungal hyphae to make a nice spongy soil structure, that has good aeration and water holding capacity, along with enormous surface areas for ion exchanges to take place.
Without the glues, the structure will collapse.
(We can also see this happening in old compost piles btw., and where I first encountered this: when the compost starts getting really fine and silty after a few years? that's what's happening there too, though in that case it's just that the microbes, having processed all the fresh OM, go to sleep, and the glues deteriorate. In this case however, an addition of fresh foods along with fibrous material to aerate mechanically whilst things get going again is all it takes )
Along with the deterioration of enzymatically held structures, aeration and water holding deteriorates too, and conditions change to favor the anaerobes, whose activity however leads to the volatilizaion of nutrients and the production of by-products (e.g. alcohols) that are detrimental to plant health. Plants need aerobic microbial partners!

As far as composition goes, NPK solutions, and even with the Ca Mag Fe and S that are getting more attention nowadays, do not really cover the plant's needs. Hence the decline in nutritional value of our agricultural produce and the rise of "civilization illnesses". There is more than enough food to go round in the world today - and yet we are undernourished - not even going to start on how glyphosate inhibits the production of certain proteins we NEED from the plants because we can't produce them on our own...!

And these are just examples of how we are unbalancing soil ecosystems by the addition of nutrients, whilst the actual problem is that we have been decimating healthy aerobic microbial herds that are meant to mine those nutrients, which are more than abundant in healthy plant matter and in the mineral portion of out soils. I'm sure there are further ways the addition of readily available nutrients impacts the soil system negatively, we just haven't discovered it yet!

So actually, my main gripe with synthetic nutes is it's the expression of an arrogant, megalomaniac attitude we have developed, pretending we can reproduce the complex processes that power natural fertility whilst in reality, we don't have an inkling of how it all works together.
Cheers!

 

[Rev. Green Genes]

that the microbes themselves will consume those readily available, soluble nutrients, like fast food.
So instead of spending energy on producing those enzymes and mining their nutritional needs from the soil, they just suck up the fast food - and by so doing, actually become competition for the plant where before there was a kindly give and take.

You are on the same track as me here. I am always cautioning people about mycos in indoor growing for these very reasons. When we load up our soil they microlife does not need the comparatively expensive interactions with the plant and they do not trade. One part you might be missing there is that the "glue" you speak of is not just root exudates and enzymes from microbes, but also raw mineral chemistry. Humic and Fulvic acids to be precise. These are a byproduct of the redox cycles activated by microbes and pH level. One thing I see nearly everybody getting suckered by is that there are major differences in the indoor (pot) and outdoor (field) conditions of soil. Whats good in Ag is not good in the greenhouse, and vice versa.