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Rock Dust, River Silt as Micronutrients

U

Ununionized

This comes after I deleted a second try at talking about this - I dredged up a buncha sh** about it from memory and put it together not organized, in any way, in a post on guerrilla tricks.

People complained, and rather than seem like I was trying to thread crash I started this one and basically did the same thing, dredged up this big ocean of facts related to rock dust and just threw them on the page as one stoned rambling post or two.

I approach this in a way that's not easy to sum up. I haven't even tried to make an outline and unless I crash this third try badly, I'm still not.

This is a subject whose central role in all botany is understated, and there are several reasons. Only one of these really matters so it ought to be the very first thing you see, when introduced to the subject. Rock dust is very difficult to apply in large amounts. Particularly in dealing with pot because your crop matters to you, it's just easiest to teach you how you can f*** this up.

I was just about to start trying to tell this story a different way, and as I did, I realized, that just a little bit of narrative will make a whole lot clearer why I tell this, the way I do.

The way and reason you can f*** up your rock dust, glacier dust, river/pond/lake/stream silt expedition, is by letting it slip your mind, however momentarily, how fine, this stuff really is.

This, as all and above all things, if you should ever dare forget it, be the guy who knew SOME about it but just had the personality profile of some distractable squirrel, and 'forgot' that 'too much' means 'too much' - you're done having fun and lots of it for free, and you're a fungal pathologist now,

because you let that clay-fine stuff coat your roots JUST thick enough that mega-tiny, anaerobic pythium fungal outbreaks spontaneously cranked on your roots here, there, however badly you forgot about this - and messed this up.

According to how much you let build up into a glue like, anaerobic paste, WAY THICK enough to sustain litttttle tiny colonies of Pythium alllllll over your root ball, here, there, like little fungal confetti celebrations, of you, forgetting wtF you were doing, and let that stuff build up. Ok?
Don't you let that stuff build up. Ok?
Because it'll do what? Form a paste.
Why? Because it's so incredibly fine.
Well, how fine is it?

This is how fine it is, when you collect it as silt, and in a practical manner if you buy or collect glacial silt, OR talcum fine rock dust, the same glue-like, paste-like danger applies, but - telling it the way I do, brings to your mind heavily, that this stuff is some of the physically finest natural material, imaginable.

There is a physical condition of being so small, something is in the size ranges, of what are called clays. Ok? And clays are among the finest materials, ever gathered by mankind. The particles of clays are so small that - you can dye material with them because the clay particles are way, way, WAY too small for the human eye to detect, and even for soap, to wash the f*** out of things.

And in some sort of raw sense here, -since, you're gonna be collecting raw materials,
you need to understand that this is true - even when these things are unrefined.
We have all seen people, leave some sort of lightly or very accurately colored garment, left in a mudhole, where the water is so thick you can't see your hand when it goes under the surface, and - that thing can NEVER be washed clean.

Last chance, for you to see these words: this was your safety meeting. You need to know that if you even make a muddy slurry with this stuff and pour it in around your roots, in a way you are literally, literally distributing a crude, water based paint, because while it's true it's not a TRUE paint, and it's a stain, it will form a glue like consistency at times, when blended with other things so you are always to bear in mind, that you're making a slurry, of clays. And their screen sizes are among the smallest on earth and you might not ever be able to see any of the scores, dozens, hundreds of tiny pythium colonies you cause to set up and each one, jussssst be hanging in there but - your plant not do well and you not really realize wtF, until it's WAY too late.

I've personally given plants root rot with it specifically to see how much it really takes and it boils down to the fact that if you make a paste of it thick enough to cover the standard little 1/16th or so root hairs pot puts a lot out of in hydroponic situations, this sorta thing, little roots called fishbone type roots - just a little patch of the stuff the size of a dime and bang: howdie, we're the Pythiums we're moving in MAKE me a SANDWICH. Aw man f***k. Well, I guess I learned, and hey - you gotta refresh and I had plenty of weed so don't you think, people don't know, you can choke out your little herd of green sheep there, and how much it takes. I already found out for you all, and the answer is ''all it takes, is too much.''

Nah I'm not that undisciplined but you just saw me say, if you make paste with this, thick enough that the roots are covered in it, even when it's aggregating with other substances in your ground, your medium whatever it might be, - if it can create a little area of anaerobic paste, sticking together little sand grains, and a chunk of this, and that - it will, and pythium spores think the thickness of a dime, is a 100 story building so - you've GOTTA be able to figure this out. The question, ''have I let this stuff build up little water-tight, air-tight globules of muck, any w.h.e.r.e. in my root zone?"

Sand grains are huge in comparison to the silt, and to the pythium spores that can start partying and doin the nasty in your root zone, and as a matter of fact the way you find the stuff is reminding yourself that sand is huge in comparison to the grains of this stuff.

So,
on with the bull shoot.
 
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U

Ununionized

The planet is comprised of a mixture of rock that is surprisingly generic. Wherever you go in the planet, particularly where your rivers flow through mountains and broken ground where lots of different rock types are - raging flood waters have a rather narrow spectrum of colors and a sorta middle brown color, people refer to the color of chocolate a lot, in regard to this 'generic planet Earth profile' -

all the plants of the Earth, live on this stuff, and because it's so generic globally, it's really pretty dependable as a source of micronutrients, for plants.

Indeed it's a VERY VERY heavily replenished substance, by nature and in fact - every plant on Earth, - well, mostly - that gets rained on? It gets, a dose, of clay-fine, natural micronutrients, washed into it's root zone.

So all plants have evolved, living on this stuff and I'm gonna try to make it plain that's what's happening, when I put it, the way I put it for you - how it winds up where you find it.

Every day when the sun comes up, there's a cycle that goes on, and it's been around since before the last time I slept and there are rumors since even before last Thursday. And that cycle, is this.

As the sun comes up dew dries all over the face of the land, in the track of the sun's path, and this leads to dusts being created. Ice melts, rock is pryed apart, then left with openings when the water melts, water turns to steam, turns to vapor really, and expands, and escapes, prying rock apart, and this is called 'weathering.'

And every day also, when the land dries the very very smallest clumps of dust, they're picked up in wind, namely thermals but by wind, just in general, and this has been going on since before - like I say - waY, before last Saturday. And this is why, every day, whether you can see it or not, with some rare and obviously notable exceptions, the color of the sky, at sundown, is a little more iron red, than the color of sunup, - whether you can see this or not.

This is always gonna be going on; and it's obviously, gonna be more, to much more notable at times, but every single day when the sun goes down, the vast majority of this day's dust, kicked up by the power of sunlight creating daily winds, just as sure as time going by, day in, and day out. And probably important to recognize it's really more noticeable when you think of it as happening season in, season out. Some seasons you're making more rock dust, some seasons you're scattering it around even more than other times,

and we all realize this is going on when we realize how ubiquitous - how universal, muddy water is, every time it rains.
Well, one of the things that happens, every single time it rains, is that - a very thin to sometimes quite thick slurry of this ULTRA fine airborne rock dust, - with some plant material and some bug antenna bits too, of course - some spores, some super tiny hairs that settled -

it comes running down off the bark of trees, off the leaves, off the leaves on the forest floor, off the rocks, off - pretty much everything, and when it starts raining if you're outside, if you catch some of that thin slurry of muddy water running right down off the barks of the trees, and rub it between your fingers - it'll seem slick - greasy - soapy- because the particles in it are SO freakin FINE, they've been airborne for dozens of meters - dozens of kilometers. Hundreds of kilometers.

And as it rains, all those openings in the ground, are flooded with this stuff.

And remember - this is only a small portion of the stuff that's formed, EVERY day. We're just talking about the stuff, that gets airborne.

Ever notice, how bark on trees, is really really rough? Ya ever wonder, why that's like that in so many trees?

Well I can tell ya this much it's an excellent way to catch airborne dusts, and holds it in place till the distilled water from the clouds comes and runs it down around the roots. Right there at the base of the tree that collected that dust, by catching it in it's bark. It's just an observation, but think about this. We all know this is happening, it's why every time you see it start raining in the forest or in the wild, you'll see all this slurry of muddy water running off everything.

So - I'm trying to make this in manageable chunks, and I guess this post is to just kinda remind you, all of ya really about something we all know, but we don't really notice outright, and make connections to our growing. Every time it rains, muddy water comes drizzling down off every blanking thing in faRiGGiN' siGHT. muddy water comes running down off trees, vines, leaves, rocks, cliffs, bridges, logs, it comes draining right off the surfaces of the leaves on the forest floor a lot of the time, it settles on your car, and it makes years old junk in barns have several millimeters' dust on it.

And - every time it rains, this stuff is washed into EVERY crevice of the soil. And, there's so much of this rock dust not just in the air, remember - we only talked about the part of it that's so fine it can be lifted airborne, that GETS lifted airborne. Many, many many times more rock dust is created, than ever gets airborne but that's where rivers come in.

When it hasn't rained for a few weeks and you get some kind of big rain that floods the local waterways, all this water no matter how deep - is so thick you can barely see through it at all. It's true, a lot of this material is decomposing plant matter but it's also true, that there are times, when the plant material, in a particular cross section of this nasty assed flowing water, is reasonably low.

This happens, when it floods: and it stays flooded, for some time. During these periods, a lot of the plant matter, begins to sink. And gravel - all that sinks, even as it's rolling out of banks, the river is cutting during THIS rain. A few meters downstream, and that gravel is rolling along, sometimes a foot or so from the bottom but - it's right back down.

The same thing actually goes - for sand. Not very many yards downstream from the local bank caving in, trees, rabbits, moths, rocks, plastic bottles, old underwear somebody threw down at the swimming hole - when all that caves in,

a few meters down stream, the top few feet of that water don't have very much of that sand in it.

When the water starts getting up to the point where it's running 6, 8, 10. 15 feet higher than normal, along some miles-long levee, or where it's risen some 5, six feet to get to the edge of the park, the ball fields, along the river in town -

It's this area where you go, to collect silt, to add to plants and I'm gonna start another post so this one isn't ten miles long.
 
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MJPassion

Observer
ICMag Donor
Veteran
Did you read before hitting the post button?

Your words are very convoluted & difficult to follow.

I’d suggest folks purchase a good grow book like the Ed Rosenthals texts then expand your knowledge from there (if you so desire).
 
U

Ununionized

You're the third person who's complained "I can't read that" so I deleted them.

Did you read before hitting the post button?

Your words are very convoluted & difficult to follow.

I’d suggest folks purchase a good grow book like the Ed Rosenthals texts then expand your knowledge from there (if you so desire).
 

YukonKronic

Active member
Why does this thread still exist? I was interested in the subject matter but it appears to be a temporal red herring..
 
G

Guest

Well, I drive about an hours south of Anchorage Alaska and collect a 5 gallon pail full of glacial silt. I dig on the banks of a river that gets a bit of salt from the high tide of Cook Inlet. I've used it on on both weed and raspberries with very good success. I think it is a great ingredient for the gardner.
 
U

Ununionized

I'm going to re-write it in a couple of minutes, people were trolling about it being so long and illegible to them, and I understand, so I just deleted the couple of posts I made on it.

Matter of fact I didn't get notified anybody'd found it I was looking through my posts to see if something had popped up I like to talk about.

I'll throw the posts back together and try to make it somewhat more legible.

Why does this thread still exist? I was interested in the subject matter but it appears to be a temporal red herring..
 
U

Ununionized

Well, back to the grind. You see people explaining that you should try to collect this stuff, from a place, where the water rises and sits, for a long time. The ball fields, down by the river, the levee, where the water spreads out way far, from the main current, and is traveling real slow.

You're looking for this real big change of speed by the water, and for it to take place back from the edge or, way up high, so you can assure yourself, that you're collecting silt,
that is the absolutely finest sizes, you can get.

Believe it or not, there will be areas - big ones - where when you pick up some of this chocolate brown, fine soil, and carefully rub it between your fingers, - there will not be a single grain of sand, in it.

And you'll think, "Nah, cMoN, whaddya mean, not a single grain of sand, in it?" Ya get another pinch, you rub it between your fingers, letting it drift to the ground.. not a single grain, of square sand, big enough to roll between the ridges and grooves of your fingerprints.

It self sifts.

And the more picky you are about trying to get some from about as high as the water repeatedly goes, the FARTHER BACK from the MAIN CURRENT - that's really a BIG key -
the better sifted,
it will be for you.

You just go find a place, where when it rains, some big stream or river preferably, that's gone through some broken country, but it'll ALL WORK - where when it rains, the water gets up, and muddy water sits out on a big flat spot, as high as you find the river, or stream, has been repeatedly doing this flood up - seep out far from the main current then sit pretty much still till the stuff settles out of it.

We've all seen it when we drive over the local bridge, and the water is out over all the plants and stuff, and it's all muddy, and then a few days later we look again and that water, is just as clear as a bell, and hasn't really receded much. The road, and the signs, the litter, have all got that thin mud film all over everything - it's that film, that you're going out to collect, as high up and far back from the main current as you can reasonably find some.

It doesn't really have to travel far back from the main current for the standard and even small size sand,

to fall out of the water.

Anywhere this goes on, you always test for it, the same way.

You look around, all you've really gotta be able to tell is 'higher' from 'lower' and 'further back from the river' from 'closer to the river'.

Don't pick light colored sand.
Do pick stuff that is very fine. The way you check is ONE test: for TWO characteristics:

NO sand. Roll it between your fingers. You ought not feel any.

Get up higher, get preferably, further back where the water crept out that far, at a real slow speed so everything but the very finest stuff, settled out.

Chocolate color. You see this phrase used by people, and I gotta confess I don't think I've got a better one. Generally speaking, the darker and more talcum fine, the better, but not black, volcanic sand. You're specifically looking for a blend that's a medium to medium dark brown.

When it's dry, and you drop it out of your fingers, it should be about as dusty as you can find.
The speed at which the water spreads out over an area, & how far, dictate how fine the particles are, and that's about the final arbiter of how fine it will be, where you're standing along the river or lake.

There is obviously no way that water is going to deliver to you a column of silt that is universally fine enough that it could have been part of that dust pall following the sun around the planet, 24/7/365.25;

but it does a halfway decent job of separating it out for you and it's free, - and by the ton too, if you're savvy enough to get some.

what we are discussing here is the reason entire regions of the world are referred to as ''fertile river valleys.''

''Fertile River Floodplains.''

Any of that ring a bell? It's all done by river silt.

And I guess that's a decent place to end this post about it, there's still some more, just general stuff about it, to add.
 
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U

Ununionized

The main reason I had all this so confused the first time is I dredged a huge pool of facts up from memory that had no real order, they just all happened to be related to rock dust, glacial dust, silt, these kinds of micronutrient additives.

This time giving it a little thought it's probably a dash clearer, I hope so because it was really messed up the first couple of times.

There are several ways to apply this stuff.

It's not really poisonous in any concentration, except for the fact it's texture, stops oxygen from getting to root material and pythium breaks out.

There's no such thing as 'poisoning' with rock dust. That's not possible because it's generic planet Earth, laying out in the yard, in the best of ways. It's health food. BUT - you can not let that stuff ball up, bunch up, and make glue in your mix.

So you've gotta tell people, ''you can't add very much,'' over and over - and that's just the people in your OWN head.

You'll see everywhere people telling you, just a teaspoon or if the plant's big, a tablespoon here, there, in a different spot each time you water, water it in...

(We're talking about trying to get some growth going on here, kinda pushing it a dash)

When we grow pot we tend to use soil that's looser, has more drainage, and we tend to try to contrive to just water more often so we're more continually, dissolving material.

Well, what plants do, is secrete Citric Acid solution. And in secreting some citric acid solution is it your personal guess, the reader, that the plant's secreting that citric acid so it can dissolve itself a bunch of that rock the size of an arm chair there beside it,
or would you figure a weak citric acid solution, might be a little better tuned,
to dissolving very, very VERY tiny micro-dusts, that had sifted down into the cracks in the soil, last time it rained?

If you're in a class about dissolving some substance, and let's just say that it was a gram of granite. Plants use the nutrients in - granite dust. it's a common rock. Now.. if you were in a class and someone told you we're gonna dissolve some GRANITE today, and you said... oH? Hmm, what WiTH? And they said, ''Diluted lemon juice!"

Which time would you be MORE surprised: if the prof or teacher came around and gave you all a little cup of diluted lemon juice, and then:

1) he plopped a little granite rock, obviously right from a quarry, about the size of a child's marble, into your cup,
or
2) he plopped down a little envelope with talcum fine, granite POWDER?

"Yeah just grab a little stirring stick and stir that rock around and get it dissolved, we've gotta hurry"

or

"Yeah just mix in that powder and the acidity of the lemon juice is going to put some of it into suspension.''

Likewise, if plant roots were meant to thrive by using the mild citric acid they secrete, dissolving rock, plants would thrive in gravel. We would all know the tricks. But that's really not the case although we know plants actually do DEMAND - to be happy in general - a profile of the very dust, that both makes up all those rocks in aggregate,
and, which washes down into their roots, every single time it rains.

I'm just emphasizing that we know for a fact plants are being fertilized by that muddy water's super fine dusts, there's really zero way around this, and the next point - as promised in no particular order,

is that the reason you acidify water, is for the very same reason, your plants acidify the water THEY exude into the ground.

In the ground there's no dependable acid source.
Plants exude, citric acid though, as if there's likely to be a dependable micro mineral source. What's it to dissolve? Rocks the size of marbles? Large sand?
If the plants were, we'd all know to just put those around the roots,
and your micro nutrients profile would be good to go.
It's meant to dissolve and chelate,
those microdusts among a couple of other things,
the plant is also trying to get benefit of dead plant/animal material too.

Another observed fact about this. When you buy fertilizer, and it is just NPK,
it's basically short something.
Ok, and then when you go over to the labels of the early, well known hydroponic fertilizers, one of the things people always notice is how - no matter how much you shake it and analyze it - the more you know, - tasting, smelling, observing under magnification - this stuff is literally, nothing more than some kind of mud, isn't it?

The answer is, that's correct. IT's literally, nothing more than mud, with a LIGHT shot of NITROGEN and a LIGHT shot of Phosphorus, and a LIGHT shot of Potassium.

You often see EDTA and think oh shit, that stuff must be very special, right? No, it's not special at all, really.

Ya know what EDTA is? Vinegar. It's a man made vinegar molecule. That's why you can put it in food.
It's not like one, it IS one.

Acetic acid with an extra atom or two attached so it'll reach around a molecular clump of rock, and cause their weights together to be sufficient that the chunk of rock, now washes around in water instead of sinking.

If you chelate using regular vinegar the molecules aren't long enough, to reach all the way around a molecular clump of some elements firmly, so they slip off and the stuff sinks to the bottom.

So people manufactured an extra long vinegar molecule and that fixed that.

Realizing that the case is what I'm explaining - how plants get by exuding mild citric acid is by dissolving these dusts, this dirty water filled with very fine dust that gets in the ground when rain washes the dust off everything - should give you a better physical grasp on the chemistry that plants are engaging in.

That it's like the chemistry you would engage in. Once again, if we had a half cup of dilute citric acid and were told we were going to ''dissolve as much granite into the mixture as we can in 3 minutes -"

We wouldn't expect to be given a 5 or 6 or 30 gram granite rock, and told clink it around in there for three minutes and see what dissolved. What just rubbed off that bound surface.

We WOULD expect to see someone hand us all little envelopes of granite POWDER, wouldn't we? And the finer, the better, right?

How fine is the rock dust that comes slithering down the trees when it rains? So fine it'll float for thousands of meters, scores of miles, in the air.

This post is really for people who have a hard time making the connection between all the other chemistry they ever learned, and botanical, or agricultural chemistry.

A lot of agricultural chemistry seems somewhat disconnected because there is a lot of inference that somehow or other just sitting there in the ground, rock and sand, are all just dissolving, *snap* like that, every time it rains and the plants are just drinking that up because ''the roots drink the water.''

And yet they know that rock is impermeable to water in general, and that really, sand doesn't just dissolve in water yet it's happening for plants, all over the world, all the time and all science says it, so obviously that's going on....

but things get a lot more in perspective, once you realize - oH, these TINY size microdusts are washing down in around the roots, every time DISTILLED WATER
which does NOT raise pH,
FLOODS the PLANTS' ROOTS with this MICRODUST.

This aspect of how plants actually grow, dissolving micro powders that are in essence the rock dust settling out of the air, the rock dust from weathering - it makes a LOT more intuitive chemical sense,

to think of mild citric acid solutions coming out of plants' roots, dissolving microdusts, than dissolving enough food to grow out of gravel pebbles, and even course sands.

When you're watering from the tap with alkaline water
and trying to claim you're creating a 'biome' in five gallons of soil mix
that's not how nature does it, ever.

Nature, washes a biome, with distilled water: over, and over, and over.

And what does this distilled water wash into the soil? Rock dust. Silt.

It's cheap, and farmers put it on fields, every couple or three years, sometimes out to every five years.
 

YukonKronic

Active member
Kewl. I can dig it. I actually am lucky enough to live around entire cliffs composed of glacial till/rock dust... it's good that you laid out how to find the silt in less geologically active/more organically dominant river and creek biomes.

I have been curious as to what nutrition one might expect from these silts. For example: would silt sourced directly from active water bodies perhaps be missing more water soluble elements as opposed to glacial till having a higher concentration due to (arguably) less exposure to liquid water?

If one sourced from a river or stream smelling of sulfur we could reasonably expect more soluble sulfur compounds but which ones are likely?

What about heavier silts for different micronutrients? Black sand from gold concentrate is high in hematite and magnetite as well as often containing sulfur, molybdenum and other metals... are these useful sources of nutrition?

If one is sourcing rock dusts from solid rock cliffs (climb up to the face and dig into the pile of "rotten" rock at its base... it will likely be weathered into a screenable fine rock dust) is there an easy way to identify the rock and/or minerals in it by colour?
For example: would lighter rocks (chalky) be higher in calcium? Would a red rock have more iron or green be copper and black just phosphorus? It seems if we can learn to identify some of these sources with even a small level of accuracy we may be able to save quite a lot of money buying... well buying dust ffs.
 

YukonKronic

Active member
Also... clays sourced from river banks are usually good sources for calcium and whatever elements are in the rocks surrounding the river..
I *think* (I'm NOT an expert, I read a lot and have a strong ability to take info from it but I'm just a dude with some plants) that bluer clays will have more calcium and redder clays more iron and possibly things like humates and tannins. If anyone knows more than me about this PLEASE share!
 
U

Ununionized

Sorry man I get subscriptions turned on & off

Sorry man I get subscriptions turned on & off

I shouldn't have purged all my links but it gets burdensome knowing I have to do my own security.

I have been curious as to what nutrition one might expect from these silts. For example: would silt sourced directly from active water bodies perhaps be missing more water soluble elements as opposed to glacial till having a higher concentration due to (arguably) less exposure to liquid water?
It's gonna vary and you can in fact figure out what your predominate constituents are using your little X100 pot flower telescope, and the various geology websites you discover, that'll talk about your specific area.
Libraries teach kids to use now more obsolescent printed books and they almost always are a mine - pardon the pun - of local geological information and of course the educated people who donate to them,
generally do so from libraries of recently deceased fans of various scientific fields so a lot of times physical libraries are - hey - go figure, ya know, laid out like they were tailor made for the area.

So if you live where there's any tourism and, where there's physical commercial farming? Hit the public facilities that are physically the very closest to you in a little ring and you'll know so much everyone's gonna realize, hey - not a lotta bullshitting you.

But back on topic yeah, there are situations where the water washed areas are lower in more water soluble substances, sorry about that ramble.


If one sourced from a river or stream smelling of sulfur we could reasonably expect more soluble sulfur compounds but which ones are likely?
I'm not an expert on sulfur remaining in soil after being deposited by the river but I do know excessive sulfur - while the plant friggin loves the stuff as do all plants,
it also translates into the flavor of your weed because most plants, pot is one of them, concentrate sulfur in the flower regions which expose critical plant components to the impacts of the outside world: viral, fungal, bacterial, and sulfur helps the plant assure some sterility in component flower parts. I personally have always used sulfuric acid as a chelator because it's so cheap and I started out growing where it was highly illegal and there was no f**n around.
Universities also recommend generally using sulfuric because of the positive impacts on flavor of consumables and on plant health. Sulfuric is the battery acid you buy at car stores; it's a direct result of the manufacture of paper and other wood products so it's quite cheap. It also as it is created, is pure when it forms, and in fact isn't purified significantly before being supplied at about 1/3rd strength for auto batteries.
That's why I'm not more savvy about Sulfur content in material deposited downstream from sulfur bearing strata, i always have it available as an acidifier hence chelator cause I grow largely hydroponically or soilless which is really similar.

What about heavier silts for different micronutrients? Black sand from gold concentrate is high in hematite and magnetite as well as often containing sulfur, molybdenum and other metals... are these useful sources of nutrition?

Nah, it's a straightforward thing directly overlapping geology where darker matter also tends to be more dense: hence it breaks down slower, hence winding up in large quantities in typical micro-dust plants can use easily,

and also sinks out of sight faster - so you're not really to do to much concentration of them because plants evolve in a mixture that discourages their reliance on heavier, more difficult to weather & dissolve, as well as source, elements.


If one is sourcing rock dusts from solid rock cliffs (climb up to the face and dig into the pile of "rotten" rock at its base... it will likely be weathered into a screenable fine rock dust) is there an easy way to identify the rock and/or minerals in it by colour?

For example: would lighter rocks (chalky) be higher in calcium? Would a red rock have more iron or green be copper and black just phosphorus? It seems if we can learn to identify some of these sources with even a small level of accuracy we may be able to save quite a lot of money buying... well buying dust ffs.

Yes man it's done by color mainly. This is one of the good things about it as I think I was mentioning above, you can sort them out quite well, by having a chart and comparing the colors of the various compounds, and then of course fishing through your local farming organizations' published work which is free generally, you can sort out a few particulars, -look at those under a little hand scope and be even more sure of what you're seeing.

It's a fascinating field especially when you have some right there near your house and get it - and look at it with your little $8.00 US X100 scope for your plants.

There is another thing though for people with color blindness. If you try to identify particular material there are lots of reds and greens in geology so you might have to find your own silts, through general purpose "big river, flood plane, general tone of soil being more darkish than light, not TOO dark because such dark mineral materials aren't the ones the mostly dissolve and aren't the ones that mostly are lighter - so they sink fast.

Middle of the road tans are what you want and to cap off something, it's important to recognize the very means by which almost ALL plants, do MOST of their spreading,

is through torrential floods hauling the stuff alive, and bunched around a tree that fell, miles downstream per big, heavier than usual flood.

So the plants of the world tend to definitionally be very forgiving about what you present them - as long as it's in these middle to slightly darker tones, rather than black or bluish, and shiny grains, this sorta thing,

and as long as you don't go with lighter stuff which will also be predominated and not a general purpose, generically middle of the shot brown, that MOST floodwaters overwhelming areas and having their silts settle over regions, deposit.

Among the lighter colored elements is silica. Normally it doesn't weather down very small; and for this reason, one of the main things you're checking for when you rub some between the ridges of your fingerprints,

is squarish grains of silica.

If you're lucky enough that you can be SURE you have a source of super fine ground silica I know it's a high dollar substance but - hey - because it's a high dollar stuff, and from recalling my reading,

I'm pretty sure you're supposed to assume it is NOT a pure silica so that would be reading you have to do about stuff you discover; I'm far from expert on this and in fact since I never expected to deal with having really great glacial residues,

it's something I expressly didn't study and haven't worked with so I dunno da diddly on that one, sorry.

These are the really cool questions that you come across when you start thinking and reading about these things, and I have a couple of other suggestions for types of reading related to this, but let me see what your second post says first; I always waste too much time sitting around on the web so I have to go do stuff I'll try to remember to come back and talk about this stuff's relationship to animals.

Turns out animals evolved eating a lot of this very same mix historically - well, also and when you think about it much more importantly PRE-historically,

and people actually use it as a nutritional supplement.

It's sorta a non-pariel among natural supplements there's no way for anything to even approach the spectrum of minerals in the stuff - because of how it gets mixed,

and how lives of animals - that's me and you although I'm often referred to being a semi-vegetable, actually evolved.

Everything else, nutritional chemistry wise, is a very, VERY - hey VERY poor substitute for this stuff to be in your diet as an animal.

They collect it and put it into a half-ass calibrated oven so they can sterilize it, and without even filtering it much, maybe through like a window screen,

they sift it out into a bunch of those gel caps they open and stand all on end, then put back together.

The subject of evolutionary nutrition is a fascinating subject of itself. Basically for you, the shiny monkey who smells like soap a lot, and who likes mirrors so much,
your entire evolutionary existence makes the past written history like the width of a human hair, in a tape measure stretching across the baseboard of a bedroom from corner to corner.

You evolved, consuming a shit load of substances you no longer consume much of if at all.

Meat and more meat,
and
dirt and dust.

Ketonic diets are the study of this eating more meat, and particularly fat meats because mankind evolved on a somewhat specialist diet: he could crack bones of kills not that he alone made but of every animal he found another creature killed.

All he had to do was wait till the animal left the kill and he could harvest huge leg bones, the skulls, and other sections the other animals didn't get into readily.

So mankind's brain evolved eating something called ketones, the fats, that other animals produce, and there are several DEADLY diseases, that are COMPLETELY CURED by simply STOPPING the constant consumption of so many plant sugars for energy. The brain is built to run on ketones, full stop, that is NOT a matter for any real speculation and we know this. It's the BASIS of paleo studies regarding mankind's early evolution. Why is homo sapiens, homo sapiens? Why was Neanderthalus so intelligent? We know. We cracked huge animal bones eating an animal diet far, FAR higher in animal fats, than other animals could ever use.

There is a movie on Netflix called ''The Magic Pill" about going around the US and Europe and having random families start living on a much more animal foods based diet and how they completely cured diabetes people were dying from,
in ten weeks, and a lot of other disorders especially obesity. You don't GET fat, living on FAT. We KNOW this, because there used to be far fewer fat people and they LIVED on FAT. You get fat and you get diabetes - living on simple plant sugars. You blow up like a hippo and start having all kinds of neurological dysfunctions.
========
Ok well there is a separate side of this and it's the MINERALS you consume. What did you evolve, for a skaJiLLioN eons, eating, living in contact with, DRINKING - don't do this for goodness sake and give yourself the squealin sh**s - don't drink, untreated muddy water LoLoLoLo!

I mean YOU know this Yukon LoL but... don't self harm is the message here to all you who see us discussing evolution and decide to - you know - self harm for whatever convoluted reasons.

Anyway there is a guy who wrote one of the most fantastic books and he has youtube videos he wrote the book, ''Dead Doctors Don't Lie.''

And he is a physician who's also a veterinarian who was a vet FIRST and he discovered that PET foods are mixed so animals specifically get, high mineral diets, and it stops a SLEW of diseases. I can never remember his name, he has a couple of two hour videos on MINERAL nutrition modern medicine SCOFFS at,
and he has SUED

and WON

against the FDA for them telling HIM cease and desist telling people vitamins and minerals CURE many serious diseases.

HE sued THEM
and WON.

And HE goes around and TELLS people: WHEN you take THIS, it's gonna CURE THAT. FULL STOP no NEGOTIATION, and a whole bunch of systemic diseases including PSYCHIATRIC DISEASES and TERMINAL ones, CLEAR UP.

I said I'd make another post but it hasn't turned out that way my bad.

But the entire FIELD of mineral and vitamin nutrition - almost the CORE of plant and animal HEALTH and LIFE - are really interesting subjects.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it unless of course all this is proven to be complete and utter falsehood in which case, I think I've been hacked and it's Iranians who said it all in an attempt to persuade the world to purchase Amway products.
 
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