I can never resist. Bought a bag of fertilizer yesterday, intrigued by the ingredients. The product is made by Jobe's which makes a lot of fertilizers for your garden. This product was intriguing to me because of the "Biozome" formula - essentially probiotics for your plants. Below is a shot of the microbes listed on the label. A few things of note
- not very high cfu/g - compare this to total bacterial concentrations of 10^8/g in active soils. I guess the idea is that they will multiple as need be
- prokaryotes of note:
- Arthrobacter spp
- Azotobacter spp - nitrogen fixers
- Azospirillum spp (it is spelled wrong on the label) - also nitrogen fixers
- Streptomyces spp - antibiotic producers, produce the compounds that give soils that "healthy smell"
- Pseudomonas fluorescens (it is spelled wrong on the label)
- Nitrosopumilus - an Archaean - this was new to me, I've never seen any Archaea in these kinds of products.
- endomycorrhizae - these are two endomycorrhizals commonly found in these kinds of products. Most of your garden plants would probably have these kinds of associations.
- ectomycorrhizae - now this is where I get a little confused. This product is marketed towards your vegetable garden, but as far as I know there is nothing that is commonly grown in a garden that you would expect to be ectomycorrhizal. My guess is that this is part of a larger group of products and they just make one giant batch and package them up for tree health or garden health depending on the target (that's what I would do anyways!)
- here's a link to the Biozome product page: http://www.obio.com/biozome.htm. Not a ton of info on there
- I'll give it a try this spring, should be fun. While it may be a little hyped up, the bacteria listed are all commonly considered to be plant-growth-promoting in various ways. Might be a fun project for a Micro class in the future to try to isolate all the microbes from this - at least the non-mycorrhizals...
No comments:
Post a Comment