CarboLoad

The notion that giving sugars to healthy growing plants will somehow improve their growth rate or help balance nutrient status is a completely unproven conjecture. Don’t be fooled; sugar fed to plants does not increase the soluble sugar inside plant tissues nor will it increase trichome density or resin production. It is pseudoscientific nonsense to make such claims. There are no scientific studies that prove this is true and so no other agricultural crops are fed sugars by their growers. One example disproving this idea is shown here:http://cropwatch.unl.edu/research-sugar-application-crops Any sugar that enters the rhizosphere will be food for bacteria and fungi, and not the plants. Just like sugars used in microbiological petri plate culture, when adding molasses or glucose to the fertigation water one is only feeding the microbes in the soil. One might consider this as beneficial, especially if this boosts the growth of beneficial plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR), but even boosting microbe growth has negative side effects. A direct consequence of feeding sugars to the rhizosphere is a drastic drop in soil pH. Bacteria and fungi will grow many times faster when given extra sugars, but then their boosted life-cycles and excessive growth will acidify the soil. This can be proven easily by adding sugar or molasses to a compost tea; overnight the pH will drop a whole point or more as the microbes go through a surge in growth and exude organic acids as by-products of their life cycle. Sugars might even encourage pathogens to grow instead of beneficial PGPR. A healthy rhizosphere pH has a wide range of 5.2 – 6.1, but sugars will make it plummet to 4.2. There is science to enlighten us on this topic, and one review article is found here: http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/12/02/jxb.err379.full If they could enter plants through their roots, more sugars would be a negative feedback signal to stop synthesizing sugars. If plants were sensitive to sugars fed to their roots their cellular metabolic pathways would be flung out of control. Luckily roots are not able to uptake a flood of sugars; healthy growth results from trying to maintain metabolic homeostasis and having gradients of sugars moving around the plant in response to the growing environment. Trichomes are shiny and transparent due to their composition being mostly silicates and carbonates. They look like crystals but they are not sugar crystals, and nothing about cannabis cultivation is enhanced by adding glucose, molasses or “sweet nectar” of any kind to the fertigation regimen.