[IBC] Glucose and stuff
 

Theo asked me to repeat this onlist, so:

In most plants, sugars are produced by photosynthesis in green
portions of the plant, and transported to the roots. Therefore, the
best way to feed sugar to the roots is to provide the plant with
plenty of sunlight. But I should explain that sugars are moved in
plants according to a "source-sink" system: sugar acts as an
osmoticum, and travels from areas of high sugar to areas of low
sugar. Roots cleverly convert sugar to starch, so they can
continuously grab sugar and store it. Think of a carrot or potato-
both are starchy storage roots.

Glucose is sometimes used to feed plants in special situations: for
instance, in genetics labs, people sometimes have to keep albino corn
seedlings alive, and sometimes roots are kept alive in tissue culture
for long periods of time. In both instances, however, the plant
tissue is kept under axenic conditions, because any microbes in the
medium would eat the sugar before the roots ever saw it.

Some parasitic plants lack chlorophyll (Indian pipe, dwarf mistletoe,
and dodder, for instance), and have to steal sugar from a
photosynthetic host. They do this directly, by tapping into the
phloem of the host (dodder, mistletoe), or by living in symbiosis
with a fungus that is attached to a photosynthetic host.

In summary, I can't think of any reason to add sugar to a bonsai. In
the soil, it would be rapidly eaten by microbes, and if sprayed on
leaves, it would be eaten by phyllosphere organisms (the fungi on
leaves aren't called "sugar fungi" for nothing).

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