Nutrient movement within plants
Now that you
understand how
nutrients move through the soil and into
plants, you can
finish the journey with nutrient movement within plants. A
nutrient's mobility once it gets within a plant's cells will
determine where deficiencies show up, as well as how you should
apply fertilizers. For example, Jeff Lowenfels is quick to
point out that foliar feeding is really only appropriate for very
mobile nutrients since immobile nutrients won't be able to move
out of the leaves to where they're needed by the plant.
I'll start with those
immobile nutrients. Calcium and boron are the least able to
move once they've been consumed by a plant, so any calcium or
boron deficiencies will show up in growing tips. More mobile
nutrients are usually moved from older (less efficient) areas to
these critical growing zones, so any problems in very young leaves
and buds are likely to be due to nutrients the plant really can't
move at all.
Deficiencies of
slightly-more-mobile nutrients (like nickel, molybdenum, sulfur,
copper, iron, manganese, and zinc) will show up in young
leaves. Finally, very mobile nutrients in plants include
nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, molybdenum, and
chlorine. Since plants can take mobile nutrients away from
old, inefficient leaves if necessary and move them to young
leaves, deficiencies tend to show up in the oldest leaves first.
Lowenfels also went
into depth about what each nutrient is used for within the plant,
but I didn't feel that information was immediately useful for the
average gardener. So, if you want to learn more, check out Teaming
with Nutrients
and read for yourselves.
| This
post is part of our Teaming
with Nutrients lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Please explain (again) your take on soil testing. I've never had one done and I've gardened for many years. As your photo depicts, deficiencies are detectable by plant performance. I employ crop rotation and try to compensate for particular plant needs at or before planting and religiously compost.