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Excellent article posted on the Salinas Valley blog by colleagues Richard Smith and Tim Hartz on zinc nutrition of crops and soils in the Salinas Valley.
Key takeaways:
1- Historically zinc deficiency was common in California, but now because of widespread use of zinc fertilizers, zinc deficiency is pretty rare. I concur, and as a matter of fact have yet to find a single plant sample which was deficient for zinc.
2- Bioavailability of zinc is limited by increasing soil pH, high clay content, high phosphorous and low soil temperature.
3- Tissue zinc sufficiency is between 15- 30 ppm (anecdotal note- blackberries tend to be in the range of 40 ppm)
4- Most common soil zinc test is DTPA extraction, which gives a good estimate of what is plant available. Generally, soil DTPA extracts from 0.5 ppm - 1.5 ppm means crop plants in that soil would probably respond to the addition of a zinc fertilizer, while a test above 1.5 ppm means there likely will be no plant response to zinc addition.
You really should read the whole article, it's quite good and definitely worth the while:
//ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=13163
Zinc
Comments:
To make an initial assessment, I would want those data, and for sure a nutritional analysis of the middle tier leaves. Send it to my email - I'd love to see this.
I'm having an issue with my strawberry plants right now the plants look green but I'm also feel that there's really harldy any blooms coming out during the season I felt I didn't get as much yields so I that was more salt issue so what I did is I leech down. I'll most felt like it's not getting all the nutrition. I have these devices in the ground that picks up everything. So what I was thinking about doing a fuller with zinc
Posted by Juan Sanchez on June 25, 2014 at 1:25 PM