^ I found this guys videos much more satisfactory to "need the facts" mindset. He uses knowledge from the agricultural industry instead of the "organic" approach.
In short, plant roots actually love sand, silt and clay, and actually don't like organic matter around their roots as it causes rot. He suggests that you should always just top feed your plants. (throw compost around the top of the plants only)
When people say don't over water your plants, it's not because of the water, but because of the organic matter in your pots mixing with water and making sewerage. (e.g. this is why hydroponics works)
Anyway, I'd suggest watching some of his videos on perfect soil for an opinion you don't find much of in home gardening videos.
(This was touchy for me because when I started gardened everyone described my soil as sandy, shit and told me to amend it with X, Y and Z. I was too lazy to listen at the time and noticed that my plants were perfectly fine growing in sand as long as I top fed regularly.)
The plant roots like the right texture. If you have clay, adding organic matter releases glomalin [0] and creates aggregates that let the water drain more easily, preventing root rot and allowing them to penetrate deeper.
Each of those - sand, clay, organic matter have a pore size distribution and different pressure that it releases water at. The amount of water and the pressure that it's released at form what's called a soil matric potential graph. The important thing is balancing those so that the soil moisture is mostly held at a pressure that the roots can access . There is a soil texture pyramid that illustrates the different soil textures and mixtures.
The guy in the video is calling mulch compost. Compost is supposed to be made of green material which contains nitrogen and other nutrients not bark and wood chips. There are different sources of organic matter that contain different nutrients, pore distributions, etc.
As someone who's done a fair bit of indoor gardening, including hydroponics I have to vouch for the video. Oxygen in the root zone is absolutely critical. Common potting mixes are almost universal terrible. Far too much rotting organic matter.
These days I do all my gardening in a 50/50% volumetric mixture of perlite and coco coir (buffered with calcium and magnesium). With a small amount of pH adjusted hydroponic nutrient and a watering can, the results you can achieve are just incredible, absolutely no comparison. Plus it's completely pest free so you aren't dragging in mite eggs, and fungus gnats.
Never using potting soil again, and anybody still using it should really reconsider. It's insanely counter-intuitive just how well plants can grow in something as inorganic as perlite. It just doesn't look like it should work.
>He uses knowledge from the agricultural industry instead of the "organic" approach.
I can't help but wonder if his knowledge applies specifically to cases where chemicals like fungicide are used. There are quite a few species of soil fungus that are beneficial to plants, including root protection, but these can be wiped out by fungicides, leaving a blank slate for harmful fungus and other pests to take hold. So it would make sense that if there were no beneficial fungus present, then organic matter would be a rot threat.
> In short, plant roots actually love sand, silt and clay, and actually don't like organic matter around their roots as it causes rot.
IMO it really depends on what you're trying to grow. I live in the tropics and there are a lot of tropical plants that do indeed thrive when the soil is heavy on the organic matter. I suspect it depends on how far/long these tropical plants have been bred away from their rainforest origins.
what types of plants do you grow? what is your climate like?
gardeners' advice that is along the lines of "what you do is wrong, what i do is right" is generally not very good, and you can feel fine telling them thanks on moving on with your life.
Charles Dowding, the father of no dig gardening, suggests, you don't need to dig in any compost or ogranic matter, just put it on top, as you've suggested. Apparently, the worms and the microorganisms then get to work and bring all that organic matter into the ground themselves working it into a nice tilth.
Organic matter is mostly feeding the soil life. Sand, silt, and clay are where the minerals in food come from. The soil life makes them available to plants.
I'm curious what HN thinks about the current trend of root washing when planting trees. From what I've read the science is still out and people tend to be split 50/50.
The root washers say that by removing all media that the sapling was grown in will give the roots more "incentive" to move into the native soil and thus it will establish quicker.
Whereas the anti-washers say you are slowing the establishment by washing away the helpful microbes as described in the article.
Then there are the people who say, DO wash the roots, but save the water. Plant the tree bare-root, but fill the hole with 50% of the saved water, and use the rest to top-water over the next few weeks. The idea is to get the benefits of bare-root planting along with saving the beneficial organisms.
The reason I ask is that my yearly tree just arrived in the post and I've yet to put it in the ground. I'd love to know what the current thinking is.
I buy bare root plants because tree nurseries repot their seedlings too late, after the roots had already begun circling the pot. The worst one I ever saw had three layers of circling roots. I got it at my favorite froo-froo gardening center. I took it back and showed their plant buyer. He said that's normal. The fuck it is.
Bare root plants never have this problem.
There is definitely a tendency of trees to behave as if they are in a pot when they encounter a huge change in soil medium. The dead tree I dug up this spring had virtually no roots outside of the original cone section of the pot it came in.
The other problem, especially with bushes, is they often put those little plastic time release fertilizer beads into their soil mix and so I'm putting microplastic into my yard. Often the roots are too fibrous to get all of the beads. I sometimes get the smaller plants because of this.
I don't actually 'wash' though, I use a chopstick to tease the dirt away from the roots. They're still coated.
Haven't transplanted many trees at all, and there are probably a million factors.
A little rule I follow is;
If the plant already looks quite unhealthy, I prefer to just put it as is straight into the ground, feed it and water it. It will take longer to recover but I believe it minimises the risk of outright killing it.
If I get a very healthy plant, I will play around with it more, slice its roots, rinse it out, make a soil mix for the new roots etc
This is completely speculative but the best results I've had so far.
I think that washing the roots and planting the tree without damaging the roots is a really hard trick to pull off.
I think that you don't want the rootball to be limited to the old pot outline, so opening it up a bit gently (so a few shakes and a little digging around) and encouraging a bit of a spread of the roots is the best way to go.
You might incentivize the tree, you might kill the tree... I don't think that this is a good plan :)
This reminds me of my favorite "thought experiment" to poke at intuition: with no other information that what most people learn in elementary/middle school science (or what I would assume is taught, i.e. the water and respiration cycles), where does the majority of a tree's mass come from?
First we might look at dirt, but that doesn't quite pan out; where does the mass come from, and how would it be replenished? We don't see gaps slowly start forming around roots, and dirt doesn't just build up in other places, so that's probably not it.
Next we might look at water, but water is only made of hydrogen and oxygen, and the oxygen is released. The water also brings in nutrients, but there's no way it brings in enough to generate the majority of a trees mass.
So there's only one place left, which is never anyone's first guess and almost never crosses anyone's mind at first glance: air. It's around this point that most people realize that a majority of a tree is carbon, which all comes in from the air as carbon dioxide.
The correct answer is water though, not air. Air only accounts for the Carbon content of the tree, which is a big part, but still a minority.
First, a live tree contains a lot of water (30-50%), that's why you need to let wood dry a lot before burning it.
And there's something else:
> Next we might look at water, but water is only made of hydrogen and oxygen, and the oxygen is released.
Not all oxygen is released. All oxygen contained in a plants molecule (mostly cellulose and hemicellulose, which are polymers of glucose, and lignin) comes from water. And there's a lot of it: there's as much Oxygen as Carbon in a glucose molecule.
I am so happy to see this on HN. A couple years ago I started learning about rhizosphere environment. It has changed how I look at my gardening. I now see healthy plants as a biproduct of feeding and caring for the soil. I imagine the soil as the external stomach of plants. When the soil is healthy plants thrive. I get excited when I start seeing larger arthropods in a new bed. It is an indication that the soil ecosystem is very healthy.
To head down the rabbit hole of soil health even further, learning about increasing the cation exchange capacity(CEC) affect on plant health has been fascinating.
In aquaponic systems, which have plenty of bacteria on the roots, we are running much lower levels of nutrients with very good growth, compared to recommended hydroponic nutrient levels. I think we are observing this interaction that is described here.
I wonder how much of this rhizophagy cycle applies to plants that don't really rely on the soil for nutrients. e.g. many of the insectivore plans (venus fly trap, pitcher plant, etc.).
In fact, if you try to plant venus fly trap in rich soil, it'll probably die.
Most of those plants would still rely on the soil for some nutrients, I assume their history in poor soil has just led to them developing additional ways to get some nutrients. Like vitamin d in humans.
I love how it starts with: Over the past few years it has become clear that plants are able to extract nutrients directly from soil microorganisms in their roots. - something that was like a baseline of plant biology when I took it in high school 40 years ago, and, according to wikipedia, we've know for over 120 years.
thomasfromcdnjs|5 years ago
There is a plethora of home gardeners and/or permaculture resources on the internet that generally like as much organic matter as possible.
I some of that strategy as it's convenient at home to supply nutrients to plants without much work.
But, I can't help but feel it's all sort of wish washy science.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHZHy3_7PPE
^ I found this guys videos much more satisfactory to "need the facts" mindset. He uses knowledge from the agricultural industry instead of the "organic" approach.
In short, plant roots actually love sand, silt and clay, and actually don't like organic matter around their roots as it causes rot. He suggests that you should always just top feed your plants. (throw compost around the top of the plants only) When people say don't over water your plants, it's not because of the water, but because of the organic matter in your pots mixing with water and making sewerage. (e.g. this is why hydroponics works)
Anyway, I'd suggest watching some of his videos on perfect soil for an opinion you don't find much of in home gardening videos.
(This was touchy for me because when I started gardened everyone described my soil as sandy, shit and told me to amend it with X, Y and Z. I was too lazy to listen at the time and noticed that my plants were perfectly fine growing in sand as long as I top fed regularly.)
thatcat|5 years ago
Each of those - sand, clay, organic matter have a pore size distribution and different pressure that it releases water at. The amount of water and the pressure that it's released at form what's called a soil matric potential graph. The important thing is balancing those so that the soil moisture is mostly held at a pressure that the roots can access . There is a soil texture pyramid that illustrates the different soil textures and mixtures.
[0] https://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/content/archive/agriculture-today...
[1] https://topsoilpros.com/what-is-a-soil-texture-chart/
The guy in the video is calling mulch compost. Compost is supposed to be made of green material which contains nitrogen and other nutrients not bark and wood chips. There are different sources of organic matter that contain different nutrients, pore distributions, etc.
grumpy-de-sre|5 years ago
These days I do all my gardening in a 50/50% volumetric mixture of perlite and coco coir (buffered with calcium and magnesium). With a small amount of pH adjusted hydroponic nutrient and a watering can, the results you can achieve are just incredible, absolutely no comparison. Plus it's completely pest free so you aren't dragging in mite eggs, and fungus gnats.
Never using potting soil again, and anybody still using it should really reconsider. It's insanely counter-intuitive just how well plants can grow in something as inorganic as perlite. It just doesn't look like it should work.
goda90|5 years ago
I can't help but wonder if his knowledge applies specifically to cases where chemicals like fungicide are used. There are quite a few species of soil fungus that are beneficial to plants, including root protection, but these can be wiped out by fungicides, leaving a blank slate for harmful fungus and other pests to take hold. So it would make sense that if there were no beneficial fungus present, then organic matter would be a rot threat.
markdown|5 years ago
IMO it really depends on what you're trying to grow. I live in the tropics and there are a lot of tropical plants that do indeed thrive when the soil is heavy on the organic matter. I suspect it depends on how far/long these tropical plants have been bred away from their rainforest origins.
arbitrage|5 years ago
gardeners' advice that is along the lines of "what you do is wrong, what i do is right" is generally not very good, and you can feel fine telling them thanks on moving on with your life.
thorwasdfasdf|5 years ago
tastyfreeze|5 years ago
jspash|5 years ago
The root washers say that by removing all media that the sapling was grown in will give the roots more "incentive" to move into the native soil and thus it will establish quicker.
Whereas the anti-washers say you are slowing the establishment by washing away the helpful microbes as described in the article.
Then there are the people who say, DO wash the roots, but save the water. Plant the tree bare-root, but fill the hole with 50% of the saved water, and use the rest to top-water over the next few weeks. The idea is to get the benefits of bare-root planting along with saving the beneficial organisms.
The reason I ask is that my yearly tree just arrived in the post and I've yet to put it in the ground. I'd love to know what the current thinking is.
hinkley|5 years ago
Bare root plants never have this problem.
There is definitely a tendency of trees to behave as if they are in a pot when they encounter a huge change in soil medium. The dead tree I dug up this spring had virtually no roots outside of the original cone section of the pot it came in.
The other problem, especially with bushes, is they often put those little plastic time release fertilizer beads into their soil mix and so I'm putting microplastic into my yard. Often the roots are too fibrous to get all of the beads. I sometimes get the smaller plants because of this.
I don't actually 'wash' though, I use a chopstick to tease the dirt away from the roots. They're still coated.
MetallicCloud|5 years ago
Get like 9 of the same plants at the same point in the life cycle, wash 3, leave 3 and do the 50\50 for 3. Compare results.
If it's as big a deal as people make it out to be, it should be obvious, no?
thomasfromcdnjs|5 years ago
A little rule I follow is;
If the plant already looks quite unhealthy, I prefer to just put it as is straight into the ground, feed it and water it. It will take longer to recover but I believe it minimises the risk of outright killing it.
If I get a very healthy plant, I will play around with it more, slice its roots, rinse it out, make a soil mix for the new roots etc
This is completely speculative but the best results I've had so far.
sgt101|5 years ago
I think that you don't want the rootball to be limited to the old pot outline, so opening it up a bit gently (so a few shakes and a little digging around) and encouraging a bit of a spread of the roots is the best way to go.
You might incentivize the tree, you might kill the tree... I don't think that this is a good plan :)
speexmex|5 years ago
jedimastert|5 years ago
First we might look at dirt, but that doesn't quite pan out; where does the mass come from, and how would it be replenished? We don't see gaps slowly start forming around roots, and dirt doesn't just build up in other places, so that's probably not it.
Next we might look at water, but water is only made of hydrogen and oxygen, and the oxygen is released. The water also brings in nutrients, but there's no way it brings in enough to generate the majority of a trees mass.
So there's only one place left, which is never anyone's first guess and almost never crosses anyone's mind at first glance: air. It's around this point that most people realize that a majority of a tree is carbon, which all comes in from the air as carbon dioxide.
littlestymaar|5 years ago
The correct answer is water though, not air. Air only accounts for the Carbon content of the tree, which is a big part, but still a minority.
First, a live tree contains a lot of water (30-50%), that's why you need to let wood dry a lot before burning it.
And there's something else:
> Next we might look at water, but water is only made of hydrogen and oxygen, and the oxygen is released.
Not all oxygen is released. All oxygen contained in a plants molecule (mostly cellulose and hemicellulose, which are polymers of glucose, and lignin) comes from water. And there's a lot of it: there's as much Oxygen as Carbon in a glucose molecule.
isbwkisbakadqv|5 years ago
thomasfromcdnjs|5 years ago
I would have been wrong, mind blown lol thanks.
tastyfreeze|5 years ago
To head down the rabbit hole of soil health even further, learning about increasing the cation exchange capacity(CEC) affect on plant health has been fascinating.
bjelkeman-again|5 years ago
k_sze|5 years ago
In fact, if you try to plant venus fly trap in rich soil, it'll probably die.
boomboomsubban|5 years ago
uniqueid|5 years ago
ghshephard|5 years ago