BOOM!
You've convinced me to skip the H2O2 soak for my next drop.
Great choice! I’ll drop some bacteria info real quick for anyone interested. There is no obligation for anyone to respond, I just want to share a little, especially for those lurking with questions.
If you breed yourself, or seed your own branches, you will find that your plants will get progressively stronger and more efficient the longer they’re rebirthed in your environment. Meaning, the offspring you produce will perform better with each generation as the microbes in your environment and the plants preferred microbes come together. These specific seed based microbes are often referred to as endophytic bacteria, or, endophytes. If one has read up on myco, that endo part will be familiar. It’s the same meaning, endo, inside. I remember this because to me endo sounds almost like indoor.
Even if you don’t reproduce seeds yourself, you’ll find that your plants are more resilient to pests, diseases, and stress. Every strain benefits from these microbes, however, specific strains prefer specific strains of microbes more than others. A lot of this is down to lineage.
In the soil, plants have the ability to feed the microbes it needs at any given time. So when the sun is coming up and the ground is cool, there will be a set of microbes adapted to that specific environment that stand out when it comes to performing different tasks the plant needs. The plant will stop giving carbon to inefficient microbes and begin giving it to the ones who are currently most efficient.
Here’s a shot of a plant using exudates to attract the microbes:
As the day goes on and the environment changes, the plant redirects this carbon supply to microbes that are more efficient in the warmth and light. It also does the same thing with myco. It will give carbon to the most efficient myco strain while shutting down others.
This balancing act takes place constantly. So as plants live and die in an environment they begin to collect those microbes they found most useful. I will link a study about transmission at the end that details this process.
That rhizophagy process that I mentioned before, microbes enter the plant roots, build up to a critical mass, then literally explode out of the root. This is where root hairs come from. This process by itself can supply as much as 30% of a plants total N requirement on its own. Not to mention the other micro and macro nutrients the plant absorbs from the bacteria during this process.
Here’s an illustration of the cycle
A great example of these seed microbes is modern day corn. The ancestor of corn is a grass called teosinte. Teosinte has been bred into modern corn all over North America. Early teosinte seeds contained specific endophytic bacteria that can be found, today, in all modern versions of corn, even after all of that breeding. Anyone who has used beneficial bacteria will know some of the names: Clostridium, enterobacter, methylobacterium, Paenibacillus, pantoea, and pseudomonas. All found in teosinte, all found in modern corn.
I just realized how long this post is and I haven’t really even started lol. I could keep going but I don’t think others find bacteria as exciting as I do
Edit: forgot to add transmission link:
Plants are hosts to complex communities of endophytic bacteria that colonize the interior of both below- and aboveground tissues. Bacteria living inside plant tissues as endophytes can be horizontally acquired from the environment with each new ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Those tiny scissors went to town creating a single node of growth. The second, so I cut off branches on the first and off with the top from third up!
