Up next in 10
How To Read Plant Product Labels? Determining If A Plant Product Is Worth Your Money! 🌻🌿💰
May 27, 2022
Have you ever wondered if a plant product is worth the money? Maybe you considered purchasing a fertilizer or soil amendment that promises the world, but does it really? this gardening in Canada video looks at whether or not the plant products you buy are work that the purchase. Key elements we want to see are: - Guaranteed analysis for fertilizers - CFU or A count of some form for microbes Join our monthly newsletter! newsletter.gardeningincanada.net Website/Blog & FREE printables: https://gardeningincanada.net Leave Me A Voice Message To Be Included In The Podcast: https://memo.fm/gardeningincanada/ —————— 👩🔬 Grab A Planner! Paperback Houseplant Planner: https://geni.us/NFTrl2 Paperback Garden Planner: https://geni.us/s9zc Digital Download Planners
View Video Transcript
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 I like to take that science and apply it to all things plants and in today's video we're going to be talking about how the heck do I yze products without actually purchasing them. So I got this question and wasn't actually a question. It was more like hate mail what I ended up getting. Specifically the video about liquid dirt. People are upset about it. And people want to know how do I have the right to judge a product based on
0:29
the label and not actually using the product so I do this because I would go literally broke if I
0:38
had to buy every single product I reviewed for you guys I love you but my bank account does not
0:44
so and YouTube doesn't pay that much just saying that's why I actually put like a marker of like
0:49
500 likes before I test the product which I'm going to I'm just waiting for it to warm up
0:53
outside I want to give the trial an actual fair chance at this I don't want to be using different
0:59
row tents and stuff because there may be too much temperature variation in there lighting variation
1:04
because there would be different lights being used at different ages i'm taking this very seriously
1:09
i'm gonna wait till it warms up outside and that's when we're going to start the liquid dirt experiment but in the meantime i actually want to do this video both to comment post it to
1:20
people who are unsure about how i do this but also help you guys actually yze these product labels
1:26
to determine whether or not it's worth your hard earned money. So let's just jump straight into
1:32
that. I think the best way to start this entire video off is I know what a product is good for
1:40
the soil or good for the plant the same way a nutritionist or a naturopathic doctor or anyone
1:47
with nutrition is able to tell you Doritos are bad and lettuce is good. Does that make sense
1:53
we can read the labels on the product we don't have to taste the doritos we don't have to do a
1:59
month-long trial of eating bags of doritos every day to see what it does to our body to understand
2:04
it can do things like cause obesity cause diabetes you know make us sluggish and lazy um so the same
2:12
thing goes with fertilizers just microbial um amendments i did a video on how to read microbe
2:21
packages, even soil bags, bags of soil, all these things, we're able to look at them and tell you
2:27
whether or not it's going to work. And the reason why soil scientists, plant scientists, agronomists
2:33
are so good at looking at this and telling you these things is because this is what they do
2:38
every single day with actual customers or clients So I don run a tractor with fertilizer on the pack of it every day day in and day out But I constantly make recommendations as to what types of fertilizer to add what types of you know
2:57
maybe inoculants you should add, should you till should you not till I'm able to make all those
3:02
recommendations to the farmers to the producers in my industry, because of the fact that I'm able
3:10
to read these labels. I'm able to read the scientific journals and I'm able to take all
3:15
that information and compile it for that producer in order to give them the best recommendation
3:19
based on their environment, what their soil tests are telling me, that sort of thing. Does that make
3:24
sense? So this is happening on a large scale between scientists and farmers all the time
3:32
And our relationship's really, really good. The farmers trust what we're saying and they don't
3:37
really, you know, we never hear from a farmer, well, how would you know that it does that? You
3:43
don't drive the tractor and put the fertilizer down, do you? And they'd be right, we don't
3:48
but they trust our knowledge and what we're telling them, right? So with that being said
3:53
as a house plant person or as a gardener, there are some things that you may want to look for
3:59
when you're looking at plant labels. The same rule is going to apply across the board. Whenever I
4:05
look at a product label, I usually skip the front entirely. And I just go straight to the back
4:13
I skip the whole top half. And I usually just head straight to the bottom. What I'm looking for
4:19
is I'm looking for the ingredients, the sources of those ingredients, and then the guaranteed
4:24
minimum ysis in percentage, along with the actual type of phosphorus or potassium source in
4:35
the actual product in and of itself. So the guaranteed minimum ysis is something that's
4:41
done either by the FDA, it'll be done by Air Food Agriculture Canada, and it is a minimum guaranteed
4:47
ysis. So this is like a legally stated thing. If they don't have that on there
4:56
it likely means that they just haven't gotten it tested before. They can tell you theoretically
5:02
what it would be, but they wouldn't be able to actually put it on their product labels if they
5:07
haven't gotten it verified by a government body. So we always want to see this on there because
5:13
fertilizer in both gardening, whether we realize it or not, and in the farming industry is done by
5:19
weight. So we know how much to add because it is by weight. And the reason it's done by weight
5:26
and sold by weight and why this guaranteed minimum ysis matters so much is because because too much fertilizer can do serious serious harm to our environment and this is why I am not a huge advocate for just dumping on loads of compost and manure willy every year because
5:45
you can contribute to things like eutrophication um just even like algae blooms in local environments
5:52
maybe not necessarily the Great Lake area like we see in some areas in Ontario Manitoba that sort of
5:58
thing but even Saskatchewan we can cause some issues here so that's something to keep in mind
6:04
Now they do have generally the same brand will have the same breakdown but what you're looking
6:10
for is the the format of your potassium your phosphate your nitrogen your sulfur if it's on
6:17
there as well and you want to make sure that it's in either a bioavailable form or a stable form
6:23
So for nitrogen, you may just see an N, you may also see NO2 or NO3 behind it, all of which are okay. You may also see like NH4, which is like a very stable locked up option of nitrogen, something commonly found in like compost manures, things like that
6:45
um for phosphate you're gonna see things like p2o5 so uh phosphorus pentoxide looks like guys
6:54
standing there with their hands up in the air um you might also see like phosphate which would be a
7:00
p03 things like in and around there um when it comes to potassium it's gonna say potassium or
7:07
going to say potash now if it says potassium that usually means that it's a in inorganic product
7:18
because potassium is just potash rock that has been refined a little bit more they're literally
7:26
pretty much the same thing so i kind of find it funny but um this one here is soluble potash
7:32
meaning it is literally potash rock stuck in water and solubilized and it's k2o in this case
7:39
so that's kind of what we're looking for there our ingredients wise this is this is a potassium
7:45
product it's a 006 so on the back i should only be seeing a potassium and i do see potassium
7:53
hydroxide and then i also see an ecophilum nodacium so again this is a stabilizing ingredients
8:01
It just helps keep everything suspended nicely in the product. But a quick Google is going to tell you what that is
8:07
If there's anything ever on the bottle that says like bat guano or, um, cow manure, none
8:14
of that matters. That not um I mean it matters if you buying cow manure you want it to say a hundred percent cow manure You don want it to say you know 50 topsoil 50 cow manure right you want to say 100 cow manure but um when it comes
8:30
to like fertilizers organic you want less ingredients here similar to the Doritos we
8:36
don't want the Doritos because it has too many ingredients in it we want the lettuce because the
8:39
only ingredient is lettuce and so the same thing goes with our ingredients on our product labels
8:45
now all this garbly glue up here really doesn't matter too much um if it has like special this
8:54
and unique that and just ignore all of it it's just verbiage they're just trying to sell you
9:00
stuff it's what it comes down to you um you just need like the raw hard facts if you're looking at
9:06
microbe bottles then we want to make sure we're looking for cfus um or like any sort of measuring
9:13
I mean, some of them will use different types of ways of measuring it, but I did a whole video on
9:19
how to read micro packages. That's kind of the main get up there. Whenever buying things, you know
9:27
dry versus water, I mean, granular is always better than liquid forms of it. The exception to
9:36
that would be organic because anything that is liquid organic has technically been suspended
9:44
and a nice moist environment for a longer period of time so there will be just naturally more
9:52
decomposition and just processing happening in the bottle so if you're going organic liquid is
9:58
actually your best shot um if you're going for inorganic then a dry granular is actually
10:05
probably your better shot for your wallet not because it's inferior like liquids inferior in
10:12
the inorganic industry it's just better bang for your buck when it comes to the product in and of
10:17
itself just make sure you keep it dry and nice and whatever else but yeah so yeah i'm gonna keep
10:22
on doing my reviews on uh different stuff you guys just sort of let me know what products you want me
10:27
to do a review on and i can do that but i just wanted to come on here and tell you that reading
10:34
labels and knowing what these nutrients can do um just what the microbe amendments can do
10:40
maybe a special mix of potting soil someone says something's unique in it i can right away maybe
10:46
call bowl shakalaka on it pretty quickly all because i mean i know what plants eat for lack
10:54
of a better term or what they jive with and what's just kind of you know industry speaking
10:59
filler type stuff, selling type stuff. Anyways, thank you guys so much for watching. If you enjoyed
11:06
the video, be sure to give it a thumbs up, hit that subscribe button, and I will talk to you guys
11:10
next time. Bye
#Biological Sciences
#Farmers' Markets
#Food
#Food & Grocery Retailers
#Fruits & Vegetables
#Nutrition
#Product Reviews & Price Comparisons