The Benefits of Calcified Seaweed for Gardening
You may never have thought of using calcified seaweed in your garden. Calcified seaweed is actually loaded in the sorts of nutrients that can help upgrade your soil. In addition, since seaweed is all-natural, it will not add any industrialized chemicals to your garden.
Improved Soil Structure
There are several benefits to using calcified seaweed in your garden. If you are trying to make a garden work on a slight slope that tends to wash away during rain, you might use calcified seaweed to help address your topographical problems. Calcified seaweed can help create an infrastructure within your soil that can reinforce it against erosion.
The other good thing is that the nutrients in seaweed are less likely to wash away as well. Unlike other fertilizers that let water drain out their benefits, the nutrients stay packed in their calcified layers.
Nutritional Benefits
Seaweed is an excellent type of organic fertilizer. It contains more than adequate amounts of calcium, phosphorous and the all-important nitrogen. Once the excess salt deposits are washed off, the seaweed is ready. When added to the soil it forms an excellent energy source for the beneficial bacteria that help enrich the soil culture. In effect, the seaweed upgrades the soil status taking poor soils and making them adequate, adequate soils and making them rich. Or, to put it another way, the seaweed helps amend the deficiencies of less than perfect planting environments.
In addition to this indirect form of aid, calcified seaweed also delivers nutrients directly to the roots of plants. It does this through its plentiful deposits of calcium, phosphorous and nitrogen.
Environmental Benefits
Calcified seaweed is also the environmentally preferable method of fertilization when compared to industrially produced fertilizer. Although nitrogen is plentiful in the atmosphere, in order to get it in the form that helps feed plants you either have to get it from a naturally occurring source or you have to extract it from the ground and then process it into a form that plants can digest. This process of nitrogen fixation is unfortunately very energy intensive. Environmental researchers estimate that industries use one twentieth of world’s yearly natural gas output on this process.
Seaweed, because it has nitrogen already fixed in the proper form right in its very tissues provides an already soil ready form of organic fertilizer. Coastal farmers have long known its benefits when it comes to agriculture.
This is only part of the benefit however. Researchers and farmers have also noted that organic forms of fertilization have better long-term effects on the soil. They believe this may be because industrially produced fertilizers increase the rate of trace mineral depletion over time. Industry must then replace these beneficial trace minerals, producing yet another step in the industrial process and an even greater environmental price tag. Organic fertilizers already contain many of these trace minerals and even when they don’t they seem to have less of an impact on their levels than industrially produced fertilizers.
Finally, organically produced fertilizer also avoids another problem related to industrial farming. Because organic fertilizers slow down the rate at which they release their nitrogen deposits (in effect rationing them), they keep from over saturating soils with nitrogen content. This over-saturation, called “nitrogen-burn”, is just as detrimental to soil health as low levels of nitrogen and can dry out the roots of crops and open them up to pathogens.
There are also a series of health problems scientists associate with industrial fertilizers (especially as they are used in large industrialized farms) which we will not go into here. Let us simply say that seaweed does not play a role in these other health problems.
Of course, no form of fertilizer is perfect. Seaweed can become a problem if you do not reduce its salt content before use. Studies have also shown that seaweed may prevent worms from properly inhabiting the same area. We might also envision a day when seaweed levels become threatened by its overuse in farming.
We are however, a long way off from this day. For now, seaweed remains a great alternative for organic farming.