A Multivitamin pill for your Plants?

It all started off as a Science project for school... an easy but interesting one.
I had been wondering about the benefits of vitamin pills for a while, whether they were really as good for you as they say... even if the vitamins were artificial (in that they were created in a test tube rather than extracted naturally).

So I suggested a project in which they tested the best medium for plant growth. Is normal potting mix enough? Are adding extra plant food/vitamins going to make much difference? Would perhaps a vitamin blend designed for humans work just as well? Or not?

So we designed an experiment in that they got 3 pots, each filled with the same potting mix, planting 3 beans in each.
One was watered with tap water diluted with a measured portion of a well known plant food. The other, the control, was just watered with tap water, the third, had a multivitamin pill dissolved in the tap water.This is one school project that really had my interest so I decided that I would 'help out' by watering each of the pots with a measured amount of their allotted liquids and recording the results.

Over the weeks I was amazed at the findings!

In the first week, both the vitamin enhanced and the plant food pots were doing equally well, and the watered plant was already behind. Then as the weeks progressed, the vitamin enhanced plants were doing better than the plant food ones.
Towards the end of the project, the vitamin enriched plant was clearly the winner!
The experiment did not allow for enough time for me to see if any of the plants actually grew any beans and how many.
But the findings were definitely worth further experimentation.

After the experiment was over and we stopped watering the plants, I noticed that the vitamin enhanced' beans outlasted the other two samples!
Later, when they were relegated to the garden during a dry spell, ( we had water restrictions so were only receiving limited rainfall), the vitamin plant stayed tougher ,survived longer than the rest.

This piqued my interest.
Years ago, a friend had suggested that instead of throwing away expired vitamins, I should scatter them in the garden to replenish the soil. I did as she suggested and noticed that the weeds didn't grow for quite a while in that area. So I began to worry about the safety of vitamin pills.
So this got me thinking, maybe we could be on to something!
So after the school project was over and the interesting results kept bugging me, I once again I did an audit of the expiry dates of all my vitamins, (natural and artificial), and sprinkled the dated ones around my garden.. ( I had quite a few laughs as we certainly received some really odd responses from the various visitors, some who were a little too polite to enquire why there were a variety of pills and capsules scattered in the garden!).
I have since planted a variety of herbs, vegetables and chilies in the garden and they are doing well, with the added benefit of very few weeds!
Some have flowered, and I have some really fiery chilies! They seem hotter than normal! A random pumpkin plant too has managed to spring up and it is flowering at the moment. It's out of season, so I'll eventually see if that is a hindrance to this vitamin enriched soil!

Maybe dated vitamins may be a healthier option to pesticides and weed killers?
That is certainly something we should explore as I am sure this could create a sustainable and clever market for recycling expired vitamins , or even another market for assorted vitamins!
This is all certainly worth some research dollars!

Learn more about this author, Karin Burke.
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