Silica
 

Sand
DG wrote:
On bamboodirect, they suggest using Dyna-gro Pro-TeKt to supply the
plant with silica. Is there another product that will work the same?
I can't find it locally.

They only recommend it for container-grown plants in certain proprietary growth mediums.

Unlike most other plants, grasses metabolise silica, and a lot of it. Sand, silt and clay are three of the four main components of soil, the fourth being organic matter. Sand is largely silica (but possibly not so easily available for metabolism); clay is hydrated silicate rock, (and probably therefore provides silica most easily available for metabolism, in general); silt is intermediate between sand and clay. So if you are are growing bamboo in a balanced soil in the ground, or in a soil-based growth medium, I think it has plenty of silica available.

Silica
 

Sand, Silt, and clay are terms used to describe SIZE of particles and not
composition.


"echinosum" wrote in message
...

Wrote:
Sand
DG wrote:-
On bamboodirect, they suggest using Dyna-gro Pro-TeKt to supply the
plant with silica. Is there another product that will work the same?
I can't find it locally.-
They only recommend it for container-grown plants in certain
proprietary growth mediums.

Unlike most other plants, grasses metabolise silica, and a lot of it.
Sand, silt and clay are three of the four main components of soil, the
fourth being organic matter. Sand is largely silica (but possibly not
so easily available for metabolism); clay is hydrated silicate rock,
(and probably therefore provides silica most easily available for
metabolism, in general); silt is intermediate between sand and clay.
So if you are are growing bamboo in a balanced soil in the ground, or
in a soil-based growth medium, I think it has plenty of silica
available.




--
echinosum

You are correct that in soil science they define these things by the size of the particles. But that doesn't exclude what I said, at least in a practical and broad sense.

Most rocks contain a lot of silicate minerals and/or a lot of silica grains, so in practice the sand in your garden soil will be mostly silica, or at least a source of silica. Things might be different if you are gardening on a volcanic soil, or the spoil heap of a mine, etc.

Silt can be formed by mechanical weathering, but to get clay we need chemical weathering. So clay (meaning small size soil particles) will reliably be clay (meaning one of a range of aluminium phyllosilicate minerals).