Gardening With EPSOM SALT For A Greener & Healthier Plant--DO NOT USE TABLE SALT!

Hi, I'm Charles Malki, biologist and plant expert with Ivory Organics 3-in-1 tree guard paint, and today we're going to be talking about salt. And not necessarily your table salt or sodium chloride, but rather an Epsom salt. And using Epsom salts in your garden, this is a product I picked up at the garden center. It's made by Pennington. It says plant nutrient and the salt of the earth. And what's so special about using Epsom salts in your garden is that it's actually derived from just two ingredients, which is magnesium as well as sulfur. And I brought with me here today a periodic table to basically show magnesium here as indicated by element number 25, as well as sulfur, which is indicated here by element number 16. But these are just two of the elements of, I'd say, several dozen elements that are necessary for a good healthy plant. We always talk about nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Those are just three. We've actually fertilized this here behind me is a Meyer lemon that we've installed about a year and a half ago. And it'll grow somewhere between six to ten feet in height. Right now it's about four to five feet. And as you can see, it's actually supported by a lot of fruits. Just right over my hand right here there's about five fruit. And over here about another three fruit. Another one behind there, four. So there's a few dozen fruit on here. And this is actually its second year since it's been in the ground. A healthy plant actually needs a variety of elements, just like our bodies when we take our multivitamins or eat a lot of nutritious foods from different food groups to get all of those different elements into our bodies. Similarly, we're going to do the same for our trees. So these trees have last been fed a few months ago. We fed it with an organic fertilizer, and there's some videos you can follow us on YouTube to see as well, where we put an organic fertilizer that's got bone meal in there, and blood meal, and feather meal, and kelp meal, and all these different sources of elements that we fed our plants with. What I want to show you, and the reason we're actually going to be adding these Epsom salts to our plant is to actually get from, you know, it looks actually quite green over here, but I want to show you another plant that's actually suffering. And some of the new growth on this plant as well that's doing really well also indicates a need for the Epsom salts to complete its diet and actually to bring these light green leaves to a vigorous dark green with a lot of vigor and growth going into the rest of the year. Let me show you this tree over here. It's another Meyer lemon tree. If you take a look in this area, you'll notice that the leaves are actually quite yellow, and over here we can see there's a few fruit that the plant's supporting that are green, one, two, and three, but there's one over here that's yellow about ready to fall off in the next day or two. The plant will naturally hold all the fruits that it can support, but having a healthy plant, which is indicated by healthy leaves, is a good indication for its ability to hold as much fruit as possible. So the fact that it's turning yellow, I'm not as concerned about these leaves as these leaves appear to be over a year old, and the plant will naturally drop those leaves that it formed a year ago, whereas the new growth, and I'm hoping you can zoom in over here and you can take a look, this growth is just a few months old, and if you can see, the center of the leaf is very green, but the outer leaves are spotted with all these yellow spots, and that's an indication of some deficiency with elements. One that's usually beneficial for plants is iron, but being that we just fed the plant a few months ago with a blood meal, with a blood meal product, blood naturally has iron in it, so I wouldn't think it's actually lacking with iron, so what we're going to do today is actually add, is add Epsom salt. I want to read something for you as well over here. So if we take a look at Epsom salt, it says many soils in different parts of the United States are naturally lacking certain minerals and nutrients. Epsom salt provides two nutrients that are essential to the development of vigorous plants, magnesium and sulfur. Magnesium is crucial to cell wall development and aids in plants uptake of essential nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur, and sulfur is a beneficial soil additive that corrects alkalinity and helps prevent sulfur deficiency. When a soil is lacking magnesium or sulfur, the problem can manifest itself in many ways. Plants suffering from magnesium and or sulfur deficiencies often experience a yellowing of their leaves. Fruits and vegetables may fail to achieve their full color, flavor, and yield. Flowers may produce insignificant blooms, and being that we've got these trees, it says over here for trees, sprinkle dry or water with one tablespoon per gallon in the circle of the tree drip line three times per year. So being that we're still in spring, we're going to do just that. We're going to add a tablespoon. This here is only a half a gallon, and it's just pure water. I've been watering the tree at the start of the video, and I just added actually a little bit less than a tablespoon. It says a tablespoon per gallon, being this is less than a gallon, and I like to monitor the progress. It says I can do this once every three months or three times a year. We're never fertilizing usually in the winter. There's something I do for my citrus trees in the which I'll do a separate video on, but I want to see the progress with just a half a tablespoon, half a gallon of water. This here has been watering, so there's gallons of water that's already been soaked into the ground. I'll continue to water this for a few minutes after we add this, and we're just going to water this around the base of the tree, and if you take a look closely over here, you can see that the bark is actually covered with this white product, which is the Ivory Organics 3-in-1 Tree Guard Paint, and that even though the sun's actually not directly shining on it right now, but it basically protects the tree from sunburn, and citrus are actually notorious for cracking when exposed to the sun or especially when being pruned and the canopy is thin, and the sun works its way in. I've seen a lot of trees damaged by sunburn, but this is a product that protects the trees from sunburn as well as insects as well as rodents to basically keep those things away from entering through the primary parts of the tree, which is the tree trunk. It could also be applied to the branches, and there's a lot of other uses. You can follow us with all the other educational videos here with Ivory Organics. If you enjoyed this video, please be sure to like it. Most importantly, subscribe so you can follow all the rest of our educational videos here at Ivory Organics. Thank you, and happy gardening.