Dr Uwe explains how soil microbes provide nutrient availability for your plants.

🌿 About Seamungus – Seamungus is a soil and plant conditioner, combining the very best composted raw materials – seaweed, fish, humic acid and manure. It is also a health tonic and planting food for all plants including natives, lawns and bare-rooted roses. Seamungus undergoes a unique composting process, specifically developed to stabilise the nutrients, maximise nutrient availability and to ensure the product is free of any parasites, pathogens and weed seeds. Most importantly, the resultant product retains the microbiology necessary for a 'living' product. Whilst Seamungus contains a wide range and good levels of plant nutrients, it is perhaps the additional unique properties contained within seaweed that provide the catalyst for providing higher yields of sustained quality. Seamungus will help your plants resist heat, drought and frost, along with pests and disease. It will retain up to 70% of its own weight in moisture – significantly increasing the soil’s ability to hold onto water and nutrients. Find out more about Seamungus at [ Ссылка ]


Transcript

This week the doc from Neutrog will chat about how soil microbes make nutrients available for plants.

I thought it was time to tackle the idea of how all those soil microbes I talk about actually help plants to take up nutrients. For this we need a little bit of science, and it all has to do with how cells take up nutrients. All cells, whether they are bacterial, animal or plant cells, have a membrane around them in order to contain the content of the cell, but the issue is if you have something that stops things from leaking out, how do you get things into cells? The membrane only allows very small things to cross - so things like gases. Other slightly larger molecules can enter via specific pores or transport systems, however even these have a size limit. So when you put out your compost or organic fertiliser, this needs to be digested to a size that plants cells can take up. This is the same as what happens in our own digestive system. The food we eat needs to be broken down for us to be able to absorb the nutrients, and microbes in our intestines do this for us.

So I assume when you have a lot of complex things to break down, you need a set of diverse microbes.

Exactly. Many microbes are very specific, so they need to work together as a community to break things down, so they secrete a range of enzymes, which start to attack and digest things like carbohydrates, proteins, DNA and all those other organic materials in your compost. At Neutrog we enhance this breakdown by inoculating our compost with eNcase, and these bacteria and fungi then come through all the way to the end product. The same microbes we put in at the start come out in products such as Seamungus. So you can see that you need a large and diverse community of bacteria and fungi to really release nutrients from complex organic molecules into a form that plants can take up.

Does this mean that the nutrients are released over a long period?

Yes. What happens is that the bacteria and fungi slowly release the nutrients at a rate that plants can take up, so you get less wastage compared to purely chemical fertilisers, where many of the nutrients are washed away or released so quickly plants can’t absorb them. In winter the microbes work more slowly so it matches your plant growth, and because of this I like to use Seamungus. It has that base of composted chicken manure but also seaweed - both of which break down over the winter months, slowly conditioning your soil ready for spring. I use Seamungus on nearly all of my plants, whether it’s my hedges, conifers, or even my deciduous trees for winter - it’s the ideal product. On top of this is you get those microbes to help your nutrient release.

So in essence, for your plants to use the nutrients you are putting out, you need a range of soil bacteria and fungi, and these can come from Seamungus. Seamungus from Neutrog is the ideal winter tonic for your garden, and it’s available at Bunnings, other hardware outlets,
and of course all good nurseries.

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