Trace element rock dust

[Sola]

Many people swear by the trace element rock dust you sprinkle around your plants for slow release nutrients.

We have so many mines operating in Australia it seems we should all be able to buy it by the tonne, if you wanted to?

ATM the only way I know to get it is in piddly little bags at garden centres and hardware stores, if anyone knows of

a way to purchase bulk I would be very interested. I'm in SA but don't mind driving a bit in the ute to pick it up.

There must be a way.

Thanks

Sola

[naja naja]

I know a supplier of it, I could ask him next time I see him. Also, just ask at ur hardware store, they can order u in alot more than they stock, ie bulk.

[Sola]

That would be awesome, hopefully somewhere in S.A.

I'll ask at the hardware store but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Most of the time they know it comes from a truck, unless you're lucky and get someone who's been there a while.

Cheers

[ThunderIdeal]

obviously i'm not an expert but i question the point in using this stuff. concentrate on organics! the minerals are already in your soil/subsoil.

[gerbil]

Each soil will differ in it's composition (both structurally and chemically), not all soils will contain the same nutrients/minerals, and of soils that are similar but of different ages you'd get different levels of those minerals, the soils i'm on are of sedimentary origin, are old and fairly nutrient poor, go few 10 k's west and a different younger volcanic soil kicks in with a different composition.

afaik that's one advantage of trading food from bioregions outside of ones own, you get a more complex mineral composition in your foods than say if you just eat off the same patch.

Depends on the definition of organics, but rock dusts that haven't undergone a chemical treatment surely must be considered organic in the broader picture? Just excavated and crushed.

Context specific, but on generally food production i.e. veges not like a bush food using plants that like their specific soil whether it be 'poor' or 'rich' (really just a context for vegetable production), the more complex a soil you can make, the better all round benefits achieved, structurally sound, nutritionally sound, stable etc.

I suppose what i'm getting at, if the mineral isn't in the soil, your body is never going to be exposed to it and it's byproducts in whatever plant uptakes it and processes it. Some plants however will not use specific minerals, so even if you have a good complex, if you don't eat a varied diet the minerals aren't utilised.

soil science is really interesting, have done a few brief courses on it, but tafe is all over the shop so you often leave more confused than when you arrived, been meaning to pick up a book on it though and edumacate myself, get the soil right and everything will be a piece of piss.

Edited October 22, 2010 by gerbil

[Magicdirt]

I use rock dusts on my garden and in my worm farm to give the worms some grit to help process the compost faster.

Sometimes rock dust is called "crusher dust" and is a waste product that they clean out of the crusher when they crush basalt for roads. If you ring a few landscape supply places and ask for crusher dust you should be able to get a trailer load for around $40. Just make sure it is dust from rock and not recycled building waste - maybe ask what quarry it comes from.

I use a mix of paramagnetic and diamagnetic (yin & yang) rock dust on my garden and my plants thrive on it. Trees started with rock dust added to the potting mix commonly outgrow trees started without it by around 20% and keep growing stronger and faster after being planted out into soil without rock dust added.

The theory goes that Australia missed out on the last ice age so our soil is old and has not been re-mineralised with rock ground up underneath glaciers on their way way to the sea when the ice age ended.

I got into rock dusts years ago ago when I read a book "Bread from Stone" by Dr Julius Hensel.

Hensel started using rock dusts instead of traditional fertilisers and he found he could get better results using rock dust than manures and conventional fertilisers of his day. When his methods started becoming popular the burgeoning fertiliser industry shut him down.

I don't use any fertilisers at all and my plants are healthy and very productive.

Rock dust takes a few years to become fully effective in the soil but it lasts for decades.

Bread from Stones

The book is old and written in a style that you don't see these days but it has a lot of good information and is well worth reading.

Anything has to be better than cadmium and mercury ridden super-phosphate.

Edited October 23, 2010 by Magicdirt

[synchromesh]

Don't wood chips do pretty much the same thing?

[ThunderIdeal]

arguably wood chips do more

to be clear gerbil, i didn't want to imply that rock dust does not fall under the category 'organic'. of course it's an organic practice, within reason. i meant to say concentrate on humus-building, mulching, pioneer plants and the like. improve the soil and soil life.

but hey if you guys think there is something to it, awesome. if your soil does lack certain elements then it makes sense. i only wonder, in that case, how much you need to cover a particular area. those bags of about 20kg certainly seem like a piss in the ocean even for a tiny backyard.

[Sallubrious]

I live in an area with sandy soil, I tried to grow organic things with mixed results and over the last 2 years I have mixed rock dust with humus. Now I am having outstanding results with everything I plant for example I planted around 4 meters of climbing beans and I was told they would get around 6 - 8 ft tall which I allowed for but to my surprise they got to around 16 ft and I was able to supply 5 households with beans for 3 months.

The areas where I have just added humus to do well for the first year but because of the sandy soil it doesn't last very long. Once it is added to the rock dust the humus lasts much longer in the soil.

I have also found that I don't need to use as much water as I did prior to using the rock dust.

Rock dust generates an explosion in bacterial populations so any partially decayed matter will break down and become humus much faster.

[Magicdirt]

arguably wood chips do more

to be clear gerbil, i didn't want to imply that rock dust does not fall under the category 'organic'. of course it's an organic practice, within reason. i meant to say concentrate on humus-building, mulching, pioneer plants and the like. improve the soil and soil life.

but hey if you guys think there is something to it, awesome. if your soil does lack certain elements then it makes sense. i only wonder, in that case, how much you need to cover a particular area. those bags of about 20kg certainly seem like a piss in the ocean even for a tiny backyard.

 

Humus is the way plants prefer to get their nutrients, there's been way too many scientific studies proving this over the years to argue about that.

I use the rock dust as supplement to my humus and also to speed up the production of humus, which rock dust does partly from the bacterial life it supports.

You really don't need a great amount to have an effect, if you add it directly to soil 1 kg per metre squared will give fair results but I use up to 5 kg per m2 with great results.

[Sola]

Thanks for all the great responses. I agree that adding compost/ humus is essential to obtain good organic

growth from your patch. I also have worms that supply me with liquid fertiliser while I'm waiting for the solid.

I add as much mulch as I can get to save water and add nutrients. Recently I bought a small amount of the trace

elements to use on the vegie patch as an experiment as I suspected the soil here was deficient in at least a

couple of elements. Haven't done any testing to find out which one/s yet. It really did make a big difference,

but as people have said to do a larger area buying in the small bags is too expensive.

I can get crusher but it doesn't have the full range of trace elements afaik, at least not the stuff here.

To get the full range I thought they got the left over dust from several mine sites, crushing different minerals.

I've just checked the salt shaker as I know it has something added to it to compensate for Australia's general lack

of something. It's potassium iodate so possibly covers potassium and iodine? I'm no chemist.

As the trace elements last such a long time and could be considered a byproduct of mining that occurs anyway I don't

have a problem with using it.

Hadn't thought about eating food from different areas quite like that. I did read an article about people having a

poorer diet when they moved from hunter gatherer societies to sedentary living. I remember thinking it was that the

plants and animals eaten were less varied but it's also where they grew, what they ate. What minerals the water picked

up on it's journey.

[Magicdirt]

A lot of Australian soils are deficient in iodine, that's why it's added to salt.

Iodine is needed in your diet to prevent cretinism and thyroid/goitre problems.

Several children in my area display the facial features typical of cretinism and are very slow witted feeble minded types in general, so iodine deficiency still seems to a problem in some areas.

Adding minerals to salt is thought by many to be an ineffective way to put minerals into your diet as most minerals need to be chelated to be absorb-able through the digestive tract. (there are many complex interactions with minerals that affect their uptake so this is not a hard and fast rule)

The best way to get chelated minerals is to eat them after they have been taken up by a plant and chelated naturally.

Seaweed (Bull Kelp) provides almost every trace element and when it is added to gardens it supplies the soil with minerals and helps to build humus in the soil.

Blood and bone also gives a good spread of minerals and builds humus as well.

Plants can also transmute elements, that is they can change one element into another element through a process of biological transmutation, bacteria can also transmute elements as well. ( several physicists and scientists dispute this but physics needs two different sets of rules to explain different things so they don't know everything, and before quantum physics came along they all believed a different crock of shit that is now history. We don't have the space to get into particle or wave discussions or unifying theories here so let's just say transmutation is possible)

Biological transmutation

So if you use rock dust in combination with a diverse mix of other organic additives you should get the full spectrum of trace elements in your soil and subsequently into your diet.

Edited October 26, 2010 by Magicdirt

[Sola]

Great post magicdirt, thanks for the info. I will definitely be using the trace elements as

there are too many people in the world already deficient in iodine.

BTW I did find a place in Lonsdale that sells half tonne bulker bags for $372.

Still expensive but better than the $$ at hardware/ landscape supplies. If people want details they can pm me.

I have nothing to do with the place but I think the ABC advertising rules are good.

Sola

[WoodDragon]

The use of rock dust complements the building of of organic matter in the soil. Humics certainly carry some trace elements, and help to chelate or otherwise make non-biologically sourced minerals available, but I suspect that for many areas of the world humus/compost/biologicals alone would not provide all of the nutrients necessary for many species.

As has already been mentioned iodine is deficient in many parts of the world; the old soils of Australia and the leached soils of mountainous places such as Tibet being two examples. Selenium and calcium are two others in a list of elements that are often lacking.

The addition of rock dust mimics the erosion of soil by wind and water, and so in that sense it is simply replicating what happens naturally anyway. Because modern humans live at greater densities and place far greater pressure on our agricultural soils than occurred during our early evolution, natural modes of replenishment will not be sufficient in many cases, and so for a lot of current human range the addition of rock dust is a good way of addressing nutritional deficiency.

Growing plants is really about growing healthy soil. This includes understanding the inorganic structure of the soil being worked with, the chemical composition and deficiencies of the soil, and the techniques for using organic matter to create a good growing medium.

The only point where I part company with Magicdirt is on the matter of biological transmutation. Most of the work describing it is dubious in terms of either it's experimental standardisation, or just truthfulness. It's not about a great scientific conspiracy, it's really just about actual science... The fact is, if plants could transmute one element to another there'd be no need to add trace elements in the first place!

Edited October 26, 2010 by WoodDragon

[Magicdirt]

The only point where I part company with Magicdirt is on the matter of biological transmutation. Most of the work describing it is dubious in terms of either it's experimental standardisation, or just truthfulness. It's not about a great scientific conspiracy, it's really just about actual science... The fact is, if plants could transmute one element to another there'd be no need to add trace elements in the first place!

 

No one has said plants can transmute all elements just some, but if they are lacking to begin with they can't be transmuted.

Science has told us for centuries that transmutation in general is impossible until the atomic age began and atomic transmutation became possible.

Scientists just have a problem of being incapable of replicating what plants have done for millennia.

It is quite humbling to be put to shame by a lowly plant especially if you have paid for a degree.

Which part of Kervrans' work is in error ?

Alas the world be flat again.

[ThunderIdeal]

it would be so awesome if true.

i skipped to the end to see the most recent research cited in that link, in the late 70's, which by the sounds of it were unable to prove transmutation. i'm more than a bit dubious, it doesn't really effect us, although as i already said it would be awesome if true.

[Sola]

Thanks to everyone who's posted as well cheers wooddragon that makes perfect sense, I'm near the top

of the catchment so nutrients are being washed away regularly. I've been working on the soil for

years and think the rock dust is going to help solve a couple of minor problems it still has.

Can't wait to find out anyway.

Cheers

Sola