Latest / Hydroponics Daily / Don’t Pour Food Waste on Your Plants!: The Hidden Danger

Transcript

Don’t Pour Food Waste on Your Plants!: The Hidden Danger · Hydroponics Daily

• 0:00
  Hi, welcome back to the podcast. I'm Dr. Russell Sharp. This week in the UK,
• 0:04
  there's a trade show called Glee.
• 0:07
  And I went to Glee a few years ago. It's a garden centre trade show.
• 0:11
  And there was somebody there selling like food processors. And they said,
• 0:16
  these food processors are so good.
• 0:18
  You can take your food waste and you can liquidise it.
• 0:23
  And then you can take that food waste and then you can just pour it on your
• 0:26
  garden as a liquid fertilizer, instant fertilizer.
• 0:30
  And today I'm going to explain why that is a silly idea and why other things
• 0:36
  that where they add fresh plant material to soil or grow media can be a real
• 0:41
  issue and why it can really harm your growth.
• 0:43
  So this doesn't just happen in gardens and garden beds, it can happen where
• 0:47
  people are advising the use of mulch on top of grow media or soil where it's just not decomposted.
• 0:56
  So that could be manure or it could be plant material.
• 1:00
  It even includes lawnmowers that mulch into the grass, these new lawnmowers
• 1:07
  that instead of taking the clippings and disposing of them, they put them into
• 1:11
  the soil beneath the turf.
• 1:14
  And the reason why it can significantly slow growth is because as soon as that
• 1:20
  plant material is there, It's made into an easily available form for the microbes,
• 1:24
  the fungi, and the bacteria that are going to decompose it and rot it down.
• 1:28
  Fantastic, you might think.
• 1:29
  All part of the nutrient cycle. The problem is that those fungi and bacteria
• 1:33
  need nitrogen to grow. They've been given the carbohydrates.
• 1:37
  And so they're going to be sucking easily available nitrogen out of the grow
• 1:40
  media or out of the soil to do that.
• 1:43
  And so your plants that are growing in the soil can become nitrogen deficient.
• 1:47
  To the point where you can even see symptoms of chlorosis if you're not careful.
• 1:52
  So if you are ever going to add organic matter in an uncomposted form to your
• 1:58
  grow media or to your soil.
• 2:00
  Or to your lawn you always need to make sure you really bump
• 2:03
  up your nitrogen levels so if you are mulching with uncomposted
• 2:06
  material always add extra nitrogen it's something
• 2:10
  that's often overlooked but can be a real issue it even
• 2:13
  occurs in farm farming farmers fields where
• 2:16
  they've overlooked this issue and added fresh plant
• 2:20
  material even dung and things like this so other nutrients
• 2:23
  as well will come out of there and the nutrients will eventually go back if
• 2:26
  you think about it it's all part of a cycle and those fungi once
• 2:29
  they've broken the material down then they
• 2:32
  they will release the nitrogen but if you've got a short living plant
• 2:35
  or a short growing season then you
• 2:39
  can get nitrogen deficiency to the point where the
• 2:41
  plants get chlorotic so just thought you'd explain to you why you shouldn't
• 2:46
  put just food waste from your kitchen onto your garden or on top of your plants
• 2:50
  and why you should always compost material or at least be aware of the nitrogen
• 2:55
  levels the other reason of course is you can encourage pests things like rodents rats mice,
• 3:01
  all sorts of things come in and eat that food that
• 3:04
  you've just put on your borders or on your plants and they can then eat the
• 3:07
  plants as well so if you encourage rabbits in then the rabbits would go on and
• 3:11
  eat the plants and mice and would do the same thing wouldn't they so you don't
• 3:15
  want to be doing that so just thought i'd talk about that one today on today's
• 3:18
  podcast thought it might be of
• 3:19
  interest to you thank you very much for listening till next time goodbye.