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market-farming - Re: [Market-farming] Sugar as a soil amendment for insect pestsuppression

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  • From: "Bill Shoemaker" <wshoemak AT inil.com>
  • To: "Market Farming" <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] Sugar as a soil amendment for insect pestsuppression
  • Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2004 09:02:11 -0500

Marlin
 
    I don't think it makes sense. As soon as the sugar gets blended into the soil it'll start dissolving. Then it becomes food for every living organism in the soil. Sure, the plant takes up moisture and very small molecules and ions in the water, but most of the sugar would be consumed by soil organisms before the plant has a chance. And what suger makes it into the plant through moisture uptake by the roots would travel in the xylem vascular bundles. Food used by the plant travels in the phloem vascular bundles. And that's the only way sugar gets into fruit tissues, by the phloem. Any sugar (sucrose) that is available in the plant gets used right away for building plant tissues. It wouldn't hang around and wait for the plant to make fruit 2 months later.
 
    Sucrose is like legos to the plant. It builds most of itself from sugar developed by photosynthesis. And photosynthesis uses the basic ingredients of water and carbon dioxide, energized by light, to create sugar. So if someone is growing really sweet melons or sweet corn, its because they're growing healthy plants with lots of green tissue conducting photosynthesis. Healthy plants make healthy food.
 
    By the way, it's amazing how much of a plant is made up of water and thin air. If you cut a plant off at it's base, weigh it and let it thoroughly dry, weigh it again, you'll discover that 90-95% of it's weight is just water. But then take the dried plant tissues, burn them and weigh the ashes. What you burned away were the solid tissues built from sugar created by photosynthesis (water and carbon dioxide). Woody tissues are really just sugars linked into lignins and cellulose. The ashes will be difficult to weigh unless you have an accurate scale because there's not much left. The ashes are what make up the mineral portion of the plant. Everything else was water and thin air. Life's amazing.
 
Bill Shoemaker
Sr Research Specialist, Food Crops
Univ of Illinois - St Charles Hort Research Center
A fellow told me yesterday that they use white sugar (spread on and worked into the soil much like you would incorporate fertilizer) as a strategy for suppressing potato bugs.  This is usually done at potato planting time so the growing plants will have time to take up the sugar into the plant tissues.  The idea is that increasing the brix in the plant creates an environment that bugs do not like.  He said that they use about 5-10 lbs of sugar per 1000 square feet.  Sounds a little crazy to me.   But hey!  Sugar is cheap and I would be crazy enough to try it on a small area.  If this is true then it should work great for growing good sweet potatoes or sweet corn?  It always seems to me that corn earworms really go for the sweet corn because it is sweet.  The same also seems true for the low acid sweeter tomatoes.  I've stopped growing some varieties of them because they always seem to be prone to something eating them before I can get to them.  Has anyone else heard of or done such a thing?
 
Marlin Burkholder
Virginia



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