Leaderboard

Some load shedding action

when buying DE it's important to get the expensive / food grade stuff as you only want the diatoms, but what most people seem to look over is that the powder you get is not the diatoms, that's just the carrier powder. that's why every second DE product looks slightly different in colour or texture and if you buy the cheapest stuff you putting talc powder and all sorts of other unwanted compounds in your soil. the product is much like mycos in the way that it needs a carrier, because diatoms are living micro organisms. they're phytoplankton. they live in bodies of water. like rivers, lakes, ocean and what not. they're extracted and kept dormant in a dried state for many many many years and they'll come back to life when introduced to water. much like algea, because as a whole, that's what phytoplankton are. your soil is not a body of water so they cannot thrive there and because they're microscopic once introduced to water or moisture they come to life again and because they're in some unfavourable habitat they quickly die off and get consumed by other microbes diatoms have bodies like cells and what makes up the outer layer of their bodies/cell wall is a pure silica compound with a sharded glass like texture, though this too gets broken down by other microbes. that's the silica release. when used as pest management it really only works when kept in the dry dormant state on your top soil where other microbes can't access it. they really only do any kinda harm to larvae. even very very soft bodied soil dwellers such as any kind of earthworm will be unphased by the diatoms. anything that can jump or fly just gona laugh at the diatoms. once you ontroduce water or any kinda moisture to the diatoms you wake them up and they basically immediately start dying off and consumed, cause they're not in their preferred habitat. if you can kill off any larvae in the top soil that's a big win already that's why I use it a lot, with most DE products you'll run into an overload of the physical powder used as a carrier creating negatively charged or dry pockets in your soil way before hitting a silica toxicity. obviously depending on the given silica content in the soil.

Interesting, and good points. Looking at it again, as I was of slightly different understanding. Found this on wiki

Day 4 almost done

Thanks for the clarification, I have heard it has much less of a pest ipm type of affect after consecutive waterings and good to note that. aswell as the available silica to gain I will be combining my next top dress with some soil, and more amendment with diatoms and I’ll add the total topdress, I did it once before and the results were noticeable. thanks for your input