SeaBoost Gardening FAQs

 If I use a stronger solution of Seaboost than is recommended on your label, will it "burn" my plants?

A stronger solution won’t "burn" your plants, but it may slow down the growth of your plants, depending on how strong your solution is.

Sea plants contain the same group of growth compounds as land plants. These compounds include cytokinins, auxinsand gibberellins, which stimulate root growth, strengthen plant tissue, and promote cell division.

Adding too many of these compounds to a plant overstresses the plant, and too much of a good thing is always harmful, for anything and anyone.

It’s always much better to use a bit less than a lot more.

How effective is foliar application of nutrients compared to soil feeding?

Up until the late 1950’s, foliar feeding, or spraying, wasn’t seen to be very effective, until researchers used radioactive phosphorous and potassium to spray a group of house plants, then measured with a Geiger counter, the absorption, movement and utilization of these and other nutrients in the plants.

They found plant nutrients moved at the rate of one foot per hour to all parts of these house plants, and was 95% efficient with virtually immediate absorption, whereas from soil application, absorption was much slower.

Source – Tukey, H. B. & Wittwer, S. H. 1956. "The entry of nutrients into plants through stem, leaf, and fruit as indicated by radioactive isotopes" Progress in Nuclear Energy Biological Sciences pp. 1060114, McGraw-Hill - N.Y.

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Will SeaBoost help in growing giant pumpkins?

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Growers of giant pumpkins have experienced positive results when adding Seaboost to their fertilizer program. The end result, according to giant pumpkin growers, is a competition sized, giant pumpkin.

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The amazing strength of plants, from the mighty Oak to the slenderest shoot or root, involves their inexorable growth and expansion by cell division. But it also depends on access to a water supply and on two interacting processes for handling water:

Osmosis and Imbition.

Water enters a plant’s roots and moves through its cells by way of osmosis, diffusing through cell membranes from regions of weak concentrations of dissolved materials to regions of higher concentrations.

Imbition is the swelling of plant tissues to several times their original volume. It comes about as the electrical charges on materials in suspension within the cells of the tissue, make these substances interact with the polarized water molecules, which perform like tiny magnets.

The suspended materials include minerals, cellulose and starches. Imbition is responsible for the germination of seeds in the first place, and can continue within a plant’s growth cells, leading to tremendous internal pressure.

Over short periods and long – sometimes over many years, the result can be enough power to break sidewalks or even boulders.

Source – Claiborne Ray – New York Times

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As if vegetables weren’t already healthy enough, U.K. scientists have found a way to add heart-healthy fatty acids to plants.

Researchers at the University of Bath genetically altered a cress plant, to produce both Omega –3 and Omega –6 fatty acids, which are thought to be protective against cardiovascular disease.

These oils are important for infant brain and eye development. The accumulation of these fatty acids in plants is a breakthrough in the search for alternative sustainable sources to fish oils.

Omega –3 fatty acids are most abundant in salmon, mackerel, sardines, while good sources of Omega –6 fatty acids include a variety of plant oils, such as soybean oil.

As fish supplies are declining and are sometimes contaminated, alternative sources of healthy fatty acids are desirable.

Source – Health & wellness Journal

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The dodder seedling latches on to its host – a tomato stalk , or carrot top – and doesn’t let go. The dodder’s tiny shoot wraps around the plant and taps into it, stealing nutrients, and it doesn’t rely on dumb luck to find its host, it has a nose for it.

Researches discovered that the plant uses chemical cues from a host plant to grow toward it. The dodder plant can even distinguish between wheat, which it disdains, and tomato, a favourite host.

Plants produce volatile chemicals that waft through the air, and it’s long been known that plant eating insects use them to locate food sources.

To verify the direction of growth, researches grew dodder seedlings in their lab adjacent to a tomato plant, controlling for light and other factors that could affect the direction of growth.

They found that although the shoots started growing in a typical rotating pattern, they eventually grew toward the tomato stalk. ( A video of this is available at nytimes.com/science )

The researchers extracted the volatile chemicals from the tomato plant and found that the dodder shoots would grow toward the chemicals in the absence of the plant itself.

Parasites like the dodder plant do not photosynthesize, and they have a limited amount of nutrients in their seed, so a shoot must find a host quickly or it will die.

Researchers found that one of the chemicals from wheat served as a repellant, and spraying food plants with the repellant chemical could control dodder infestations. Another alternative is to genetically modify food plants to produce the repellant chemical on their own.

It doesn't have to be direct sunlight. Reflected light is better than being in the dark. The plant needs certain wavelenghts of light, called the action spectrum, for photosynthesis.

Blue and red wavelengths are more efficient, green wavelengths pass through and are not absorbed, which is why plants appear green.

Molecules of chlorophylls, in the chloroplasts, the green structures in plants, do most of the absorbing of the light.

Reflected light may have the right spectrum but because it is reflected, it will lose intensity and not be as efficient as direct sunlight.

It may leave plants "leggy", that is, the units between the leaves are longer, because there is not quite enough of the light to do what it would normally do.

Reference: Dr. Dennis Stevenson- New York Botanical gardens