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Can You Water Plants With Carbonated Water? Soil Scientist Explains Why Plants Like Carbonated Water
Apr 27, 2022
One of the common questions I get from plant people is whether or not it's a good idea to water with carbonated water! Logic would say that the fizz of carbonated water would allow for better pore space. When you water plants with carbonated water you first want to make sure that it is warm temperature. Watering plants with carbonated or sparkling water provides some macronutrients. But it also can surprisingly help with the uptake of micronutrients. Studies show watering plants with sparkling water can result in a rapid increase in growth!
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0:00
Hello plant people how are you guys doing today if you're new around here my name is Ashley and I'm a soil scientist on this channel
0:05
I'd like to take that science and apply to all things plants and in today's video
0:09
We're gonna be talking about sparkling water and this entire topic was completely spurred by the fact that I made a video
0:16
Discussing the difference between reverse osmosis water distilled water and tap water
0:20
I think spring water too as to which one would be best for your plants both indoors and out and in that video
0:27
I got a ton of requests to do a video on sparkling water and whether or not
0:32
There's a big difference between that and just regular water that is not carbonized. So I dug into the literature
0:41
Surprisingly, there are some research studies on this which just completely blows my mind
0:46
But we'll be discussing those and the science behind why sparkling water
0:51
Carbonated water Maybe a better choice for your plants. Let's jump straight into it
0:57
So sparkling water could be club soda. It could be water that is into the ones the DIY ones that you have at home
1:04
I think they're called soda streams. I have one That would be considered carbonized water anything without the additional sugar
1:13
So yes flavored waters would fall under this same scope. However However, for the purposes of this video, we're going to leave out the flavored waters, which
1:23
may contain artificial flavoring, and stick more towards just carbonized water. So club soda, Perrier without the lime, or just the stuff you use at home
1:35
So the SodaStream water with no flavoring. So when we look at carbonated water, we can see some macronutrients that are present
1:44
something very similar to what we see in spring water. So if spring water in particular is carbonized, there's some pretty large benefits to that
1:53
So just in regular club soda, for example, there's several macronutrients. So the three main ones are in there, as well as sulfur, magnesium, and a little bit excess carbon, obviously due to the excess CO2
2:10
So if you were to use carbonated water for your plants indoors or out
2:15
The biggest thing to follow is that you would use it every second watering you could use it every single time
2:21
But if you're adding fertilizer to it and stuff, you're gonna find that it's going to fizz over so go aim for every second time
2:28
so you're able to incorporate excess like added fertilizer With just regular tap water and then you would do carbonated water without the fertilizer in it
2:39
But other than that you just want it to be room temperature So don't take it out of the fridge and use it because it is it can shock your roots or it can shock your plants
2:50
Especially if they're tinier plants So seedlings in particular not a good idea to use cold water with so you want to keep it room temperature And if possible even sun warmed I say that all the time that is the best potion or the best temperature water to water your
3:07
plants with so this is where the science comes in a lot of studies found that
3:11
plants watered with co2 infused water so carbonated water actually had better
3:18
drought tolerance this may apply more so to gardeners than anything else and
3:23
you're probably wondering well why is that as many of you may know photosynthesis carbon dioxide is
3:29
a huge portion of the photosynthetic formula and how photosynthesis is produced by a miracle it in
3:38
nature amazes me sometimes roots actually are able to absorb co2 in the soil now generally co2 is not
3:47
heavily abundant in the soil and therefore when it is placed in the soil in excess the plant can
3:54
actually get all its co2 needs from the roots this means the plant doesn't have to allow the guard
4:01
cells to open up to allow the stomata to uptake that carbon dioxide so typically in the process
4:08
of photosynthesis carbon dioxide is brought into the plant to help with the formulation of the
4:15
the carbohydrates used in photosynthesis through the stomata. And we've talked about this before
4:21
Once those stomata open up on the plant, the plant releases, the exchange of that is water
4:27
So it's going to sweat out or allow water to evaporate from the leaves
4:32
Meaning if we have excess CO2 in our soil through watering with carbonated water, we
4:38
completely alleviate this issue because the stomata never have to open up again and therefore
4:44
evaporation can't take place at an exponential rate meaning it's a lot
4:49
better suited to surviving droughts the other huge benefit we see why don't we
4:55
have excess carbon in the soil is elevated levels of growth now the studies
5:02
can't confirm exactly what the cause or the increase and rapid vegetative growth
5:07
is they say it could be the carbon but we'll maybe get into why or the theories
5:12
why it could be something else a little bit later on so this is where my brain
5:17
gets triggered so I'm gonna read this directly off of a study that was dead so
5:23
a study was done on fruiting plants and foliage of plants watered with
5:28
carbonated water and the study showed when looking comparing control which wasn't watered just with regular water and one that was watered with carbon
5:38
water it showed that the fruit had higher concentrations of zinc copper iron
5:43
magnet manganese all of which were increased with carbonated water and then
5:50
the controls had lower levels of zinc manganese and then also copper and iron so when we looked at the actual leaves when we look at the leaves on the CW they refer to it so carbonated water treatment we had higher levels of
6:08
calcium in the leaves magnesium and then what else just higher calcium and
6:14
magnesium and then in the untreated or the control that was using regular water
6:19
we saw lower levels of these two so this right away made me think without even
6:25
Even reading the rest of the study, I right away when I was reading this, I started getting
6:29
excited and I was like, oh, the pH, what's the pH of carbonated water
6:34
And so sure enough, I did look that up and the pH of carbonated water is around a 4.5
6:39
which we know is incredibly low. And therefore, in my mind, I'm thinking that it temporarily, most likely decreases the soil
6:51
solution pH. So you may have a pH that is higher because you've either amended your soil with, say, the lime we were talking about in another video when we're talking about amending our potting soil line
7:03
Or maybe you have a pH neutralized soil. Maybe you're buying like a Fox Farm soil
7:09
You're spending a little extra cash for potting soil with an equalized pH
7:14
When you add the carbonated water to it, it's going to make a solution
7:18
We call that a soil solution, meaning the porosity and the soil are no longer separate mechanisms
7:26
They're kind of, it's like a smoothie. It's all in one. So we had the raspberry separate from the yogurt, and now we have the raspberry and the yogurt
7:33
blended together. And so that's what happens with our soil slurry or soil solution, meaning so long as that
7:43
carbonated water is suspended in the soil before the CO2 can you know gas off over time we end up
7:51
with a lower pH meaning we're totally changing what nutrients can be uptaken in what volumes
7:59
for that plant so that temporary decrease in pH most likely is allowing for nutrients that
8:06
generally is not captured at a lower pH or at the regular pH the potting soil is at
8:12
giving it you know 24 hours or a 12 hour period where the plant can uptake those nutrients and
8:18
then reset or rebalance itself back to the soil pH that it originally needed so one thing I will
8:25
say about all the studies I found there was one that did mention that if there is excess carbon
8:32
in soil solution they didn't see any correlation with exponential plant growth meaning they didn't
8:38
think excess carbon in the soil was going to be up taken at a feverish pace, meaning that the
8:47
theory of better drought tolerance would be nullified. If you were to compare the journal
8:54
that saying it does increase drought tolerance against the one that saying there is no effect I mean those would kind of equal or balance each other out So there are arguments coming from both sides meaning this is not fact this is total theory at this point and there really isn a lot of articles out there one
9:13
article that was famously quoted in several blog posts I looked at was one
9:19
time by the University of Colorado and now I thought I could find this thing and
9:24
it is wiped off the internet it does not exist I don't know if it ever exists
9:28
but they continually cited it because apparently in this study it showed
9:33
Exponential growth like two times better growth for the plants underneath a carbonated water
9:40
Application so something keep in mind. I couldn't find that in journal study again
9:45
But there's lots of studies that do reference it. So my thoughts are you know what
9:50
I don't think the bubbles are going to add aeration you know they might break up your soil structure a little bit but in theory you
10:00
don't actually want that disruption because then it's basically like a tillage you're breaking apart the natural aggregates of your soil that
10:08
have formed through our glues our soil glues our exudates from our plant roots
10:15
the decomposition of our plant roots that the holes that the critters have
10:19
made so technically the carbonation like the physical effects of carbonation would be negative when we're looking at soil or soilless medium however the
10:30
lowering of the pH or the addition of those macronutrients you know obviously
10:38
beneficial and also the addition of extra carbon I mean that should go
10:42
unnoted typically in especially in a conventional fertilizer scenario you know our carbon may be lacking in some cases because we're not adding in a lot
10:52
of organic material and so using a carbonated water will work wonders now
10:56
you can test this out it's not gonna harm anything if you don't test it out do I
11:01
think you're missing out on something huge there's nothing in the data to show
11:06
me you are but I would love to know what you guys think down in the comments
11:10
whether or not you've tried this and whether or not you're gonna try your own
11:13
experiments at home I would just I would love to know if you've tried
11:18
carbonated water I think the best scenario would be carbonated spring water
11:26
sun warmed that would be like the ultimate water if you were to water a
11:31
house plant with so just something to keep in mind I hope you guys enjoyed
11:35
this video if you did be sure give it a thumbs up hit that subscribe button and
11:39
as always let me know in the comments down below what videos you want to see next because my videos are all based off of what you guys want to see I will
11:48
Thank you
#Biological Sciences
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#Bottled Water