MadSci Network: Botany
Query:

Re: Does distilled or carbonated water affect plant growth?

Date: Tue Feb 25 20:02:01 2003
Posted By: David Hershey, Faculty, Botany, NA
Area of science: Botany
ID: 1046156873.Bt
Message:

Distilled water should contain no mineral nutrients, so it would not provide 
any missing nutrients. Plants irrigated with a fertilizer solution should grow 
better than plants irrigated with distilled water. Plants provided just 
distilled water and no fertilizer might have yellowing leaves, dead shoot tips 
or leaf edges, and be much smaller than normal. All those are symptoms of 
mineral nutrient deficiencies.

If you had a very fertile soil, then plants irrigated with distilled water 
might grow as well as plants irrigated with a fertilizer solution. That would 
be because the fertile soil has sufficient amounts of mineral nutrients for 
optimal plant growth. If your tap water had toxic levels of boron or sodium, 
then distilled water might give you better plant growth than tap water.

Carbonated water would probably not contain any missing mineral nutrients 
either, unless it was a naturally carbonated mineral water that contained some 
essential mineral nutrients. 

Plants require fourteen essential mineral nutrients - nitrogen, potassium, 
phosphorus, magnesium, calcium, sulfur, iron, manganese, copper, zinc, boron, 
chlorine, molybdenum and nickel. Some plants also require or benefit from 
sodium, cobalt and silicon. 

Plant scientists who study mineral nutrient requirements of plants usually 
start with distilled water and then add back all but one of the essential 
mineral nutrients. Then they can see what a deficiency of a single mineral 
nutrient does to a plant. They grow plants without soil with their roots in a 
mineral nutrient solution. This technique is termed solution culture or 
hydroponics. 

Reference


Re: How to do a hydroponics project?





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