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Rock Dust For Plant. What Does Rock Dust Really Do For Plants? Hint: It Is NOT A Micro Nutrient.
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Apr 27, 2022
Rock dust for plants is becoming more and more popular. Rock dust is commonly suggested for both house plants and plants out in the garden. but does rock does actually supply make her nutrients? Or is rock dust in the garden more so as a peach buffer. This gardening in Canada video jumps into the soil science behind rock dust and the purpose it serves for your plants. 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 https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/GardeningInCanada Seed Purchasing: Zappa Seeds:
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0:00
Hello plant people, how are you guys doing today
0:01
I'm a soil scientist. On this channel, I like to take bedside
0:06
and apply to all things plants. And in today's video, we're going to be talking about rock dust
0:10
So this is a highly requested video and I actually mentioned it recently in a podcast
0:16
I was a part of the Jane Perrone on the Lenge podcast
0:21
and that's mostly for houseplant people. But we were talking about ways to supplement the soil
0:26
and rock dust did come up in the conversation. So I thought we'd go through it a little bit. Some of the over inflated claims of the product
0:36
but as well as the role or the purpose the product does play, and why as a houseplant person or as a
0:42
gardener, you may want to consider the use of the product in and of itself. So let's just get
0:48
straight into it. Now I do have a houseplant planner and in it I do discuss some things you
0:53
can do to test your soil just to see what level your mix is at, how useful it is, how well it
1:00
drains, how microbially active it is, that sort of thing. So you can grab that house plant planner
1:08
either on Etsy or as a PDF copy over on Amazon, but I'll leave the links for that down below
1:15
So rock dust is basically silicate rock that has been ground down into a fine powder. So it's
1:22
giant rocks being made into little microscopic tiny rocks. And it's kind of a natural weathering
1:29
process that just takes place with the earth's crust. So two really common options is limestone
1:37
and then also phosphate or phosphorus rock. Now those two options have about 70, 74, didn't want
1:47
to mess it up 74 different types of minerals ranging from obviously the 17 essentials if you
1:55
watch the plant series things like calcium magnesium manganese molybdenum iron that sort of thing but
2:02
the other 74 would be like silicate and all these really exotic things on the periodic table that
2:09
us as plant people really don't care about and don't really serve any purpose to either our soil
2:16
or to our plant. But these overabundance in nutrients doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad
2:22
thing because it doesn't harm and it also doesn't harm plants, soil or plants, either way. So while
2:29
it doesn't have a benefit, there is no harmful side to using the product. So when we add rock
2:35
dust into our house plants or into our soil we can use two really easy products to find such as gypsum and lime So these are also rock dust They just not marketed as pretty as the actual rock dust product but they have the
2:55
same essential nutrients in them, same wide range of essential nutrients. And so they serve the same
3:02
purpose. Now the benefit to using a gypsum or lime rock dust is that we can actually adjust our
3:08
pH. So if we are using a potting soil, which is relatively acidic, if you're using coconut
3:14
quire, or if you're using peach, both tend to be a little bit more on the acidic side
3:19
we could use something like lime to actually raise the pH while still supplying some extra
3:25
minerals into the mix. The other option would be gypsum. And this be me more applicable to the
3:31
outdoor gardener folk who are looking to lower the pH. Maybe you have an acid loving plant
3:37
that sort of thing you would add the gypsum to that soil to bring that ph down and i've mentioned
3:42
this in several different videos um including a houseplant one and a gardener's one so just check
3:48
those out if you want a little bit more information on exactly how and why that does work so with that
3:53
being said that means the generic rock dust you buy is heavily marketed as this miracle product
4:02
that supplies essential nutrients or hard to find nutrients that aren't available in the soils and
4:08
aren't available in potting soil. So the claim of it not being available in potting soil is probably
4:14
relative considering potting soil is a soilless mix meaning it doesn't have topsoil or earth in it
4:22
For the garden people especially those of us here in North America I mean the claim is a little weak
4:28
because a lot of our soil, all of our soil, whether it be sandy, clay, silt, or somewhere in between
4:35
all those has been basically ground down bedrock that the glaciers put a ton of work into. So that
4:42
means that the nutrients in both the soil and the rock dust are going to be relatively similar
4:49
Things like calcium and magnesium deficiency should not be happening in your garden soil
4:55
they may happen in heavy production such as in an agriculture production scenario but your garden
5:02
should never be lacking these nutrients if you're noticing deficiencies in this it's actually likely
5:09
your ph but if you're noticing deficiencies in calcium or magnesium things of that nature in your
5:14
house plants actually maybe because it's absent but with that being said rock dust does need to go
5:20
through a certain level of mineralization and bioavailability transfer meaning we need some microbes to do a little bit of legwork for us So that nutrient release is not quick And by not quick I mean can take
5:36
decades to be achieved. Now there'll be some minor levels of calcium that are available because
5:42
calcium is relatively water soluble. So it's pretty quickly picked up from the rock dust
5:48
But I would actually aim or get you guys to think about rock dust more as a way to correct our soil pH, both in the pawning soil and in the garden, but not so much as a nutrient type thing because it's not
6:02
It's just it takes way too long. And by long, I mean your kids' kids aren't going to really see the benefits of it
6:08
So just something to keep in mind. I looked through a ton of studies on this, none of which alluded to any miracle yield
6:16
increases due to nutrient uptake. There was lots that said that nutrient or that yield increases were three times higher
6:26
in the fields that had rock dust applied. Now, I would think that that increased or that changed maybe because they actually adjusted
6:33
the pH into a nutrient bioavailability realm more so. and they do talk about that in the study. I would assume that's more the case rather than just all
6:42
this huge influx of 74 minerals, most of which are useless to the plant. That's a little bit where I
6:50
would go. Now what I would have liked to see from the studies, and I know costs and stuff obviously
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inhibit a lot of the scientific papers from doing this, but a biomass, either above ground or below
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ground between the control and the rock dust option field would have been nice to see because
7:08
then we would have saw there was maybe an uptick in the biomass holding calcium, magnesium
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things like that, which would have been cool, but they did not do that. So I can't say definitively
7:20
that there is, you know, excess of these nutrients in there. And that's what caused this massive
7:25
yield increase. However, one thing that they are realizing when it comes to rock dust, especially
7:31
in an outdoor situation, even in an indoor situation for that matter, is that when it is
7:36
applied, it actually increases the soil's ability to capture CO2, which is really, really cool
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Farmers currently in Canada, and I'm assuming it's the same in the US, actually majority of the world
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farmers get hit with carbon tax, but they don't get carbon credits for sequestering carbon
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So I mean kind of a meh. But if they did get carbon credits
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I mean there would be a reason to invest in actually applying rock dust
8:05
So I wanna just read out what the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC said about rock dust So they say that rock dust naturally is able to remove one gigaton or one billion tons of carbon dioxide
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from the year from the atmosphere in a year, which is crazy. So that means if it was applied to
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like mass produced farm land we would maybe see some extra carbon sequestration the other study
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that I actually looked at that's really kind of cool is if you are composting cattle manure or if
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you are top dressing with manures and compost if you ever top dress with manures or compost
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it's always manure and then compost because manure is it volatilizes so it releases a lot of gas
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And so if you ever bought like the earth's medicine product that I have spoken about
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on the channel, not sponsored, not affiliate, even, um, if you crack the top of the bottle
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sometimes you'll notice there's almost like a gas release. That's NH4 that's of levelized nitrogen
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And so to reduce those losses of nitrogen and essentially reduce the loss in a fertilizer
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is what it comes down to. you can actually add rock dust to your manure to help keep it in because there's studies showing
9:30
that it doesn't volavilize nitrogen off as easily when we have that kind of setup so that's actually
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kind of really cool too so if you were to use rock dust in that application it would be manure
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rock dust and then compost and if you are starting a new bed my personal actually no I'm gonna I'm
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to bump that up. My soil scientist recommendation is that we add a layer of manure, a layer of rock
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dust, test your soil first below the manure layer, see if it's high or low. If it's high or low
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then we're going to use the rock dust, either gypsum or lime, respectively speaking. And then
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we're going to put compost on top of that. And we're going to rototill that in about 12 to 15
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ish inches in depth and then you will have an awesome awesome garden going forward so
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that's all i have for you guys on rock dust here today like i said i wouldn't focus too much on
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this miracle amount of minerals being added your main focus should actually be on the fact that
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it's adjusting the ph which is its true benefit that you're going to be able to unlock within your
10:37
lifetime most rock dust you're not going to see the benefits until like your kids kids kids have
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children, unfortunately. So I would thank you guys for watching. Be sure to give the video a thumbs
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up. Hit that subscribe button. Let me know in the comments down below what you want to see next
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I will talk to you guys next time. Bye
#Biological Sciences
#Ecology & Environment