Seaweed has more than 70 minerals, vitamins and enzymes. Here are just a handful of its many benefits and uses:
- Liquid seaweed solution promotes additional budding if applied as the plants are beginning to bud.
- It extends the shelf life of fruits and vegetables if applied 10 days before harvesting.
- The extract lengthens the life of cut flowers if they are sprayed with it a day or two before cutting.
- It can also be used as a rooting solution. Place cuttings in a solution of liquid seaweed and water until roots develop, then plant. When planting seeds or transplanting, water with the solution.
- If applied to pasture crops, the algae increases the nutrient uptake, the protein content and overall quality of the crop.
- Seaweed extract also boosts crop yields, improves resistance of plants to frost and disease, increases uptake of inorganic constituents from the soil, bolsters resistance to stress conditions and reduces storage losses of fruit.
- It promotes vigorous growth and helps deter pests and diseases on fruit, flowers, vegetables, lawns etc.
- Seaweed fertilizers are especially useful in organic gardening. They contain almost every micro-nutrient in a fully chelated (immediately available) form. The algae is also full of carbohydrates, which plants use as a building block. Numerous beneficial microorganisms also use carbohydrates as a food source.
- Liquid seaweed fertilizers (especially the alginates in the seaweed) act as soil conditioners. The alginates react with metals in the soil and form long, cross-linked polymers in the soil. These polymers improve the crumbling in the soil and swell up when they get wet. They also retain moisture for a long time.
Important Plant Hormones in Seaweed
Another major component in liquid seaweed fertilizers is the hormones. The main hormones in seaweed are auxins, cytokinins, betaines and gibbelerins. These hormones are essential to plant health. Most of these are only required in very small proportions, but are important nonetheless.
Auxins
There are many different auxins, and they all have their specific roles. One of their main functions is balancing speed of growth. They have both growth-stimulating and growth-delaying functions. They also stimulate root growth and prevent bud forming or bud opening at the wrong times.
Seaweed can play an important role in the production of the plant’s own auxins, because the enzymes formed with the help of trace elements from the liquid seaweed fertilizer play an important role in the formation of these auxins.
Cytokinins
Cytokinins are another group of important plant hormones. They initiate and activate basic growth processes. The cytokinins available in liquid seaweed extract stimulate growth with greater vigour because they mobilize nutrients in the leaves.
They also provide protection from marginal frost (up to -3 Celsius). Cytokinins also retard the senescence (aging processes) in the plant.
Betaines
Betaines play an essential role in the osmotic processes in plants. They help to increase the water uptake in plants and are extremely helpful in dry conditions. Betaines are also particularly helpful to plants under stress.
Packing Size 200 Liter Barrel