I 've been subscribed to
http://electricfertilizer.com/ for a while now and I just got sent this nice little email.
I highly recommend subscribing to his newsletter if you're into this kind of thing. He's an electrical engineer and he answers all of the questions I ask.
Revisiting some ideas I wanted to share, I've been making a list of some of the topics to write about in short-form... In this one I'd like to address some of the advantages of using electroculture when gardening indoors or in small spaces.
Whether you’re growing fruits, vegetables, herbs or anything else, applying small amounts of electrical current to your container gardens has some huge advantages:
1. Faster growth
When applying electricity to your soil, you can expect to see some major improvements within the first two weeks of sowing seed. If you’re running side-by-side comparisons, you can expect to see your shoots growing longer, and your initial set of leaves growing larger than the unpowered plants.
2. Less light is needed
Growing indoors has its own set of challenges, one of which is limited access to good lighting conditions. Aside from your growing directly in front of a window, any other plants will likely have inadequate light unless they’re supplemented with an artificial light source. Even the plants in front of a window will have limited light some of the time.
As for the reason why... Another effect of electrical stimulation is an increase in leaf pigmentation, thus giving plant leaves an improved ability to absorb light, especially in low light conditions. Some people have even grown cucumbers and cherry tomatoes successfully indoors using electricity to help things along.
3. Increases in yield
The last but perhaps the greatest advantage is the increases in yield you can expect. While the increases are dependent upon a number of factors, the average minimum increase that I have found was about 10-20%.
While that may not sound like much, if these methods are used at-scale, that can make a huge difference.
Most experiments I’ve read about had more than a 30% gain, and still others had gains 70% and larger. In fact, if you look deeply through the literature on the topic, it’s possible to see gains of more than 100-200% or even more in some cases. It all depends on the type of plant being grown and a bunch of other factors, too.
Since growing indoors usually means that you’re limited on space, yield increases are especially welcome.
So, If you’re an indoor gardener, consider giving electroculture a try. All it requires is a little electricity and a few minutes of your time to get started.
Let me know if you've experimented on anything lately! Have you seen similar results yourself?
Talk to you soon,
- David
P.s. By electrify/powered he means one electrode at each end of the pot. Connected to a charge of a simple USB or less. (I think, I'm not the electrical engineer after all)
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