Originally Posted by
plantbrain
You may "think" all day long and all you want, however, that is not going to answer anything. To do the test you suggest, you need to have the RO like water in the water column.
Otherwise, the nutrients entering the leaves will skew the test.
The best way to evaluate sediment and it's effect on plant growth is two/three part:
1. Dry weight biomass totals without interference from water column(eg, it must be independent) between the treatments.
2. Specific N and P content(or whatever nutrient of interest, Fe, Mn etc) in the dry weight biomass samples of the plant leaves and roots.
3. Measure the content of the product over time and at the initial stage
These can confirm the questions you want to know.
Otherwise, you are no better off than guessing.
I'm "happy with the results" of my exclusive arm pit hair dosing as well, but it provides little comparative analysis from other folk's arm pit hair dosing methods. hehe
You may have been under dosing the water column, well, then ....of course adding more sediment ferts will help, whereas when you have non limiting water column ranges, you no longer see much effect.
ADA plays this silly baloney game in their "supposed test" of their sediment test between plain sand and ADA AS. One sediment has nutrients, the other has nothing, there's no nutrients in the water column.
Of course even a brain dead person would predict more growth because one treatment has more nutrients and the other has none.
That's the only test they offered and it answers what anyone would already know.
What is needed is a comparative test that would show it works better than say MTS, delta soil, Osmocoat pellets, Jobes sticks etc.
Same for your product.
Also, is it a function of the user's errant water column dosing? Or is the sediment really the effect?
I totally agree with using sediment fertilizer.
But as synergistic part of total fertilization that includes water column dosing.
It makes management far easier for most hobbyist.
Folks forget to dose the water column etc, adding NH4 can help for long term supply in sediments, but not in the water column(fish work there pretty good), water column is easy to add etc and meter.
Few do either or, so testing it that way and the results will often be very skewed. So it will be difficult to rely much on aquarist observations independent of many other factors.
Why are you not doing these test yourself?
Your product, your $, your time. It is your test after all. You can pay labs to measure the parameters above for somewhat reasonable amounts.
You can just do without such test, but you really cannot say much, most root tab marketing stuff/claims copies eachother with their little sale's pitches. None I know of have done the above test. I think I'm one of the few who have in this hobby.
There's many other factors not accounted for and it might and might not offer much help to an aquarist, depends on many things(their habits, water column, CO2, light, type of plant etc etc).
Root tabs are easy to make, I can go out in the rice patties here and dig some clay wetland soil, mash them into balls, they are very similar to ADA AS.
I do not need to do the other test since they already have the data for the soils for rice, but I do not know what impact the soil will have on the 300-400 other aquatic plant species.
But since I know it's similar to ADA AS, I can predict somewhat well.
So you can go about it a few different ways to get around things.
Then be a bit better off in what you can/cannot say about the product.
Simpler test, think hydroponic like emergent aquatic plant shoots added to small flask and allowed to grow in various sediment/root tab combinations.
This rules out light/CO2/and water column dependencies between treatments.
It does not provide specific aquatic plant environment hobbyist keep, but it does answer the issue of the water column problems and CO2 etc, and makes the test much easier.
Try that yourself.
Regards,
Tom Barr
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