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Bonsai Care Articles Fred's Tips Fertilizer; and Why Do We Need It?
Bonsai Care Articles Fred's Tips Fertilizer; and Why Do We Need It? | Fertilizer; and Why Do We Need It? |
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| Written by Fred Nowak | |
| Thursday, 28 August 2008 | |
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What food does a tree (through photosynthesis) produce? Yep, you guessed it right. It is carbohydrates. What food does the tree use in order to grow? Yep, you guessed it-carbohydrates. Well if a tree generates carbohydrates and uses those carbohydrates, what purpose does a fertilizer serve? Is it like a hormone, a facilitator, or a vitamin? Lets take a very brief look. For plants to grow and thrive, they need a number of chemical elements and they are: • Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen- all are available from air and water • Nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium (these macronutrient ingredients are found in most packaged fertilizers • Sulfur, calcium, and magnesium-secondary nutrients • Boron, cobalt, copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum, and zinc-micronutrients The most important of the ones and needed in the largest quantities are nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Why?
• Every amino acid contains nitrogen and tree cells contain amino acids
• Every molecule making up every cell’s membrane contains phosphorus and so does every molecule of ATP (the main energy source of all cells) • Potassium makes up 1 to 2 percent of the weight of any plant and is essential to metabolism Without nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, the plant cannot grow because it cannot make the pieces it needs. It is like a car factory running out of steel or a road crew running out of asphalt. If these macronutrients are missing or hard to obtain from the soil, this will limit the growth rate for the plant. In nature, the N, P, K often come from the decay of plants that have died. In the case of N, the recycling of nitrogen from dead to living plants is often the only source of nitrogen in the soil. To make plants grow faster and stay healthy, you need to supply the elements that the plants need in readily available forms. That is the goal of fertilizer. N, P, and K availability is the big limit to growth. So why don’t we (as humans) need fertilizer to grow? Because we get everything we need from the plants we eat and the meat of animals that ate plants. Plants are factories that do all of the work to process the basic elements of life and make them available to us.
Source: How StuffWorks “What is Fertilizer and Why do plants need it?”
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| Last Updated ( Thursday, 28 August 2008 ) |
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