Hey guys, I know Mama always said that steamed veggies are healthier than boiled because they retain more of their vitamins, but after steaming up a batch of some good old local organic brussel sprouts last night and looking at that golden,green water in the steamer pot I began to wonder? (By, now, you know that the whole organic thing has consumed my entire brain compartment). I've always assumed the green is just mainly chlorophyll, but some vitamins have to be leached from the veggies even during a short steam. So here's what I have in mind. Instead of dumping it down the sink like always, I am going to start funneling it into containers and saving it for watering in thermo compost bins,worm bins, making FPEs', and hopefully AACTs' in the near future. What think ye? Any comments or critisms are welcomed. BTW, most of all vegetables I eat are steamed, and I rarely eat out, so it should add up fairly fast.
Cooking veggies depletes most of the nutritional value of the food, that is why raw diets are so much better. Not to say there would not be some value, but don't expect much.
I'm not expecting a gold mine out of it, but for anyone who's left a steamer pot after cooking and went on a weekend trip can testify there's some biological activity happening in that water. Whether good or bad I do not know, that's why I'm open to suggestions. My thinking is that it would be a good way to recycle the earth's most precious gift for a good cause, other than dumping it down the sink and into the sewer. @ Gr8tful, yes, I eat a lot of raw veggies as well, but some I prefer cooked, i.e, brussel sprouts.
Sterilized agar gets activity too, but it does not mean it has lots of nutrients. Anything sterilized with some nutrient value will get activity. I am cautious adding anything sterilized into a non sterile environment.
Boiling water decreases the amount of oxygen in the water and if your using tap water it would be detrimental to use it in any organic compost pile/AACT in which microbe populations are important because boiling the water would help remove chlorine, but it WILL NOT remove Chloromine (stronger version of chlorine) and it IS in your tap water, and it will kill microbiology, if your using R/O or distilled water to steam the veggies then it should be beneficial to your AACT or probly more so in a compost pile.
There's no chloramine in my water, but the TDS is horrible. A lot of people claim that when growing organically this is a non-issue, but I feel differently on the subject. I have observed the effects of my city's tap water on outdoor plants after long term irrigation with it, even after days of bubbling. I think it will be OK to use the steamed veggie water in small quantity and for the applications I mentioned before, but I will NEVER use it for watering my indoor ladies. They are on strictly a rain-water only.
poppybgood I've asked this question before and if my question was directed at you then I apologize. My question is about the TDS that you're measuring. Are these high numbers from Calcium in the water and if not then what element do you feel you are finding? Thanks. LD
Our municipal water is horrid here LD. Ironically I live very close to the purest, most pristine water source in the state. The water from our local springs is bottled. I read the analysis on our tap water, but I'm still not sure what may be the problem. I have ran side by side tests with peppers in containers, one being watered with rain water and one with our city water. Same medium, everything. The city water here, even after being bubbled for days will cause any number of annuals, including cannabis to yellow out and develop solid purple stalks. Some people say it's too much dissolved salt. Do you have any idea what it may be?
poppybgood As you've probably heard we get a lot of rain in the Pacific Northwest. Nature provided a viable way of getting rid of that water through a web of streams & rivers with most of them flowing into the Columbia River as it rushes to the Pacific Ocean. Meaning that water management is a huge issue since agriculture and horticulture enterprises are the 2nd and 3rd largest industries here after tourism. The water that we get in the little berg we live in is direct from the Clackamas River which is from snow melt from the Mt. Hood National Forest - as pure as you can get for municipal water supply. I went to a water district that pulls from this river and looked at their filings with both the state and federal EPA groups and besides the usual chemical agents from human activity, the 3 main elements tested in the water are Sodium, Copper & Lead. Probably because of the water source, i.e. river vs. underground, it's far less likely to have Calcium issues whereas well water (underground aquifers) can easily have uber levels of this element. If I were going to guess from the description you provided as well as the information you got from others, I would suspect that Sodium is the culprit here. Calcium in high levels, and you'd have to be talking about really high levels, could manifest some issues but the pH would indicate that, i.e. it would have to be extremely high pH numbers. Like in off the chart. Since you've set yourself up to gather rain water then I'd say you've got the best solution possible. On the subject of water from steamed vegetables: The basic elements that are leached from the plant material (Calcium, Magnesium, Phosphorus, et al.) will remain in the water with a couple of exceptions through vaporization. What you will lose are vitamins. Take Vitamin C for example. With a molecular formula of C6•H8•O6 you can see that heat will take that one apart pretty quickly leaving you with the basic elements once the bond is broken. Here's a couple of other examples: Vitamin A - C20•H3•0O Vitamin B12 - C63•H88•Co8•N14•O14•P - and as you can see things are far more complicated but the process remains the same. HTH LD
Poppy, it's mineral solids in your water (this includes sodium). These elements should be listed on the gov't mandated annual water quality report availabe to you from your water supplier. That's it really. Dissolved solids of some shape, form, and elemental matter. If you are a small grower and want to eliminate the headaches often brought about by municipal water spring for bottled distilled water. Forget about pH and what not. The distilled water will have hardly any trace of minerals and NO you do not care about that - YOU are supplying all of the minerals your plants need. Growers don't need "minerals" from water - we supply what we want our plants to have and anything found in H2O besides the two H's and the single O is dubious and a potential hazard. Just saying, .89 a gal will solve any problem one has with "water" in the garden.
This is a question and not a suggestion - what about running water through Activated Charcoal or use what is common in Japan - Bamboo Charcoal? Or is there more involved? I should probably talk to the big time salt-water aquarium hobbyists. They're pretty nutty about water quality. LD
That is absolutely spot on. Reef enthusiasts have as much or more published data and research on light and water quality as any common online source for horticulture - perhaps even more so on some subjects. Photosynthesis and "life" is equally important to aquarium life as it is to plants. Just for fun folks ought to read about PAR light and water quality in the reef enthusiasts boards. PAR is PAR and so on so forth. An interesting thought about homemade charcoal filtration. Would this fall into the whole pluses and minuses (+/-) realm of chemistry, chelation priniciples, et al? That would be a helluva a fun test for someone with an EC meter.
Possum I agree with you on hanging out with these guys. Like you mentioned, usually the information offered is far better than what you find on garden forums. These guys definitely have the science dialed in and with enough money and/or credit cards it's a really fun hobby! Check out some of the products at MarineDepot.com in the areas of water purification, supplemental lighting, etc. Pretty involved stuff - for me anyway. LD
My rainwater does great for my gardening purposes indoors and out. I only do a few plants indoors in the winter as a hobby, so my water needs are low. I also recycle my de-humidifier water to use for my indoor plants. Outdoors my vegetable garden is another story. During dry times I use approx. 500 gallons per week, give or take a 100. Next year I will post up some pics of my tomatoes and squash. Edit: I've conjured up ideas for a largescale charcoal and sand filtration system but never made it materialize. I'm lucky where I live to have a solid 80 inches of rain on average per year. When it comes a dry spell, Worst case Ontario I take a 200 gallon water tank down to the creek and fill it with a bilge pump to irrigate my garden. I do anywhere from 400 to 600 lbs of tomatoes a year and a few hundred lbs of zuchinni and yellow squash. Not a lot of money involved, but I do get a lot of other good, organic food in trade. That's what it's really all about for me.
Yeh I agree. I've got the depot previously bookmarked (pumps, diffusers, doodads, and other neat stuff) and also this site Advanced Aquarist that happens to have a great reflector study worthy of reading. The java plugin can be a real pain for some OS'. The good doc Sanja Joshi writes very user-friendly articles on a variety of topics parallel to the growing world.
Sorry buddy but if you live in north america your water DOES have chloramine and chlorine, they use it to kill bacteria etc and chloramine is a more powerful version of the chlorine they use, it will be in the water in trace amounts, get it tested if u dont believe me. I have an R/O machine, not too exspensive, good investment for when there are dry spells and u run out of rain water (which is a better option to water with if u dont live near an industrial area)
Sorry man, but my city water has no chloramine. Not trying to start an argument, but I know the man in charge of the treatment. I live in a town of 300 people. Our water is treated with sodium hypochorite. If you google it, you'll find that there are many small towns that do not use chloramine.BTW, that's just a chlorine-ammonia chemically bound-the reason for it is because the bond is so hard to break down it's more effective as a stand alone treatment. Large cities use it because often the old water lines and heavily polluted water supply demands it. Edit: And calcium hypochlorite. When I run out of rain water I use a 200 gallon tank mounted on a flatbed and a bilge pump to irrigate my garden with aquafer water. It owuld take a serious r/o unit to supply me with 300 to 500 gallons of water per week if there's a drought. That rarely happens here anyway.
FUD!! Ist I lol'ed then after I looked up what that meant I LMAOed'.FUD - NetLingo The Internet Dictionary: Online Dictionary of Computer and Internet Terms, Acronyms, Text Messaging, Smileys ;-) Back to the sub-topic at hand, yes LD I believe you hit the nail on the head once again with the diagnosis on my water. It's already uber-full of Cal and Mag, then treated with calcium hypochlorite at intervals. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's only used as a shock after a line rupture, etc. I don't have a TDS or ppm meter, but a friend of mine does and I could get baseline numbers from him. He grows hydro and uses the local spring water for his needs. AFAIK, the state of Floriduh still allows residents to harvest 5 gallons spring water per person per day unless they've changed it. It's what I do that's illegal. If you're not directly at the spring and are drawing it from the run you are in violation. If I was unfortunate enough for FWC to see me at a boat ramp with a large tank and a bilge pump I'd be screwed.