Provided to the QAM News
We all love a quick fix, don’t we? If it comes in the guise of a common or inexpensive item already in our kitchen just waiting to be asked to solve our plants’ fertilization or pest problem, it’s darn near irresistible.
It was enough for new gardeners to contend with the already existing, largely inexact or incorrect, information in books and on the internet about things like adding eggshells to your tomato’s planting hole to “to add calcium” and prevent blossom end rot. So every May in the gardening forums on social media, the memes and the questions come rolling in about such things as they get recycled for another year.
But now, advertisers and influencers have seized on this marketing concept. I can’t count the number of Instagram videos I’ve seen about magically propagating rose cuttings in potatoes or bananas. One plant care app ad I’ve seen shows turmeric and soda as pick-me-ups and cures for sad houseplants. I signed up for the app, and thankfully these fixes were nowhere to be found while using the app – just normal things like “not enough water”.
That doesn’t delete the image in my mind of pouring soda into an ailing calathea, and I suspect the same is true for many viewers.
Let’s take the magical rose cuttings. I did see a like-minded Youtuber make a mythbusting episode about some of these techniques, illustrating mistakes like “this cutting is now upside-down in this shot”, which is great. But he doesn’t have the sway or following or purchasing power of some of these other folks, so I suspect more people will see the magical rose ads.
Most of these myths are trading our wishful thinking and laziness for half-truths. We want these methods to be true, and they kind of sound true. Also, who wouldn’t rather use a nice natural substance like turmeric, baking soda, or vinegar instead of an unpronounceable list of chemicals that comes in a bottle for $12.99? Plus, it would feel so good to recycle those eggshells to help your tomatoes, especially if your town doesn’t compost.
The half-truth is that eggshells do contain calcium. However, the calcium remains locked in that shell for years before it breaks down, so it’s doing nothing for your plants this season. Also, blossom-end-rot, which forms a disfiguring black sink hole at the base of early season fruit, is not caused by a lack of calcium.
Irregular watering inhibits the tomato plant’s ability to absorb calcium, so even if you liquefied eggshells in a blender to break them down faster, it wouldn’t help. The answer is simply to water more consistently – up to three gallons a week per tomato plant, possibly more in a pot. Sometimes it’s just cool weather that encourages it. If you still get blossom-end rot, you can cut around the squishy bits or save seeds from it. In my experience, later rounds of tomatoes usually improve.
But wait, you say. I’ve been putting eggshells in my tomatoes for years and I never get blossom-end-rot. That’s wonderful, but you may have just lucked out. To prove the eggshells worked, you’d have to take two plants of the same variety that you know is prone to BER, give them the same planting site, and poor watering conditions and see if the one with eggshells sailed through blemish-free.
Today I saw a syndicated column running in a Pulitzer-prize winning newspaper about uses for Coca-Cola in the garden, which ranged from using as fertilizer to cleaning rusty tools. Just having those two things together raises alarm bells. If it’s strong enough to break down rust, is it really something you want at the roots of your beloved plants? As we’ll see you might want it on the roots of your unwanted plants, but I wouldn’t even recommend that.
As the late great garden writer Larry Hodgson wrote in “The Laidback Gardener” blog https://laidbackgardener.blog/:
“Adding too much sugar to soil can lead to dehydration, as water will be pulled out of the plant’s roots to dilute any concentration of sugar (this is due to osmosis, something many of you probably vaguely remember from school). Plus the bacteria and fungi that break down sugars are not usually ones that are beneficial to plants in any way and may become so numerous they “gum up” the soil, preventing air and water circulation. Also, many sugar-loving soil microbes are actually harmful to plants, notably causing root rot.”
We should also note that Coke is extremely acidic, which can be a detriment for many plants. It contains both phosphoric and citric acid. An environmentally friendly landscape designer recommended a citric acid spray for me to use to kill the rampaging buttercup in our yard. It wasn’t harmless to other plants, but perhaps better than certain chemical products.
For the same reason, it’s not wise to indiscriminately pour vinegar onto your weeds because it will affect the surrounding soil and plants too. If it can kill weeds, it can also kill your cosmos and asters.
If you are triggered by cliches, here comes one:
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is and it’s probably on the internet.
As with an inconvenient number of things in life, the gray answer usually involves more reading, thinking, and patience than these quick fixes. Before you empty your spice cabinet onto your raised bed, do some research about your issue at places like these: