Self-sufficient Veg: Energy, Water, Nutrients

Energy, water nutrients — the three big things a plant needs. All are essential.

Surprisingly similar to you and me, really.

Turnip: light, water & feed me

The main difference is the source of energy – plants get it from light by photosynthesis using their amazing chlorophyll invention, we animals eat organic material and breathe in oxygen.
Photosynthesis

Liebig says: growth is determined by the scarcest resource, not the total of resources.
Law of the Minimum

You need to remember that. Provided pests and disease don’t afflict your plants their success will be determined by the most lacking of these three essential resource types.

Unfortunately for economists and poets, money and love aren’t what make the world go round, it’s energy. If a mouse wastes more energy getting its food than it gains by processing it then it will die, something to think on when we humans currently expend ten times as much energy to produce our food as we get from eating it. If a plant doesn’t get enough energy it won’t fruit. Ultimately if nearly all of a species get this energy equation wrong that species will die out (hope you’re beginning to listen, human monkeys).

Light capture is the main determinant of your crops’ performance, if you don’t believe me devise an experiment or two to test it. You should always think of this when growing your crops: they must get enough light otherwise they will under perform at best.

Water is the thing that underpins all known life on this planet. Its original role was as a solvent – something that chemical reactions happen in – but has become much more as life has made best use of it. Water’s role is hard to confine: it is structural, transport, solvent, catalyst and probably many more. So, water is essential at all times for your plants’ success. When it comes to maximising crop yields it usually makes a huge difference if plants have ample water at crucial times.

Nutrients are more complex, they are the chemicals the plant needs to build itself. Some critical ones: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen – are available to plants from the atmosphere. The rest are acquired by the roots, the most important being N, P and K.

The most important is nitrogen (N) which is crucial for all green growth. It’s a bit surprising that plants haven’t evolved to extract this from the atmosphere since it’s about 80% of it, but nitrogen is quite unreactive so hard to access from air. One family of plant, the legumes – beans, peas, clovers etc – do absorb nitrogen and deposit it as root nodules. This is known as ‘nitrogen fixing’ and is used by ‘green manures’ to increase nitrogen levels in soil. You can also do this organically by adding compost to your soil or by using artificial nitrogenous fertilisers.

Phosphorus (P) and Potassium (K), also known as potash, are next in importance. Then there are many more critical elements that you usually only notice when their lack causes problems. I’ll have much more to say about fertilisers another day meanwhile:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertiliser

So it’s quite simple really, just ensure your crops get the three things they need: Energy, Water, Nutrients.

Actually it’s even simpler, you can mostly boil these three down to one five letter word. I’ll leave you to ponder that till next time.

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