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Plant hardness preference

Soilwork

Soilwork

Member
Joined
22 Nov 2015
Messages
559
Hi All,
Does anyone know if theres a list of plants that come from soft water areas and one for harder water areas please.

Hoping for something quite comprehensive

Cheers
 
That is an excellent question @Soilwork 👍 While many, many plants will do fine in hard water, I would expect plants found exclusively in "harder water areas" list to be fairly short simply because not many water ways in the tropics where our plants come from contain hard water - quite a few plants can actually be found in brackish water (high salinity) such as Java ferns and some Anubias species.

Cheers,
Michael
 
Soilwork said:
Does anyone know if theres a list of plants that come from soft water areas and one for harder water areas please.
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In general, cosmopolitan plants are hard-water tolerant. On the other end of the scale, plants restricted to regions like Pantanal require very soft and acidic water.
Yet perhaps you'd better ask not about "hardness" but "alkalinity", which is probably even more important as it determines pH.
 
_Maq_ said:
In general, cosmopolitan plants are hard-water tolerant. On the other end of the scale, plants restricted to regions like Pantanal require very soft and acidic water.
Yet perhaps you'd better ask not about "hardness" but "alkalinity", which is probably even more important as it determines pH.
Click to expand...

Do you know which prefer low or high alkalinity?
 
dw1305 said:
Hi all,

What @_Maq_ suggests and I'm going to guess the easiest way to find ones that don't thrive in <"harder (more alkaline) water"> would be to trawl through the forum for plants that are frequently mentioned with <"iron (Fe) deficiency"> symptoms in a lot of different threads.

cheers Darrel
Click to expand...

Hi Darrel

Could you also add why that might be? Just iron availability due to precipitation?

Cheers
CJ
 
Because in water which is not soft and acidic the accessibility of iron is much lower. So, if a species is often mentioned facing iron deficiency, it's likely this species requires soft acidic water.
 
So in that case plants that don’t show iron deficiency symptoms in hard water must be able to get by on lower levels of available iron?
 
Hi all,
_Maq_ said:
Because in water which is not soft and acidic the accessibility of iron is much lower. So, if a species is often mentioned facing iron deficiency, it's likely this species requires soft acidic water.
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What @_Maq_ says. Iron (Fe) is a two edged sword, where you can have problems with both "edges".

These edges are <"low availability in alkaline, well oxygenated conditions"> and <"toxicity in acidic, reducing conditions">.
........... it (iron) is a very strong hard lewis acid which easily forms insoluble salts with many of the hard lewis bases within our hydroponic solutions. When iron is added to a nutrient solution in its “naked” form (for example when adding iron (II) sulfate) the ion easily reacts with carbonate, phosphate, citrate, oxalate, acetate or hydroxide ions to form insoluble compounds that make the iron effectively unavailable to our plants.....The solution to this problem is actually easy and comes in the form of chelating agents that “wrap” around the iron ions and make them disappear to anions that may want to form stable salts with them. There are many of these chelating agents with the most commonly used being EDDHA, EDTA and DTPA.......
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Soilwork said:
So in that case plants that don’t show iron deficiency symptoms in hard water must be able to get by on lower levels of available iron?
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That is it, the issue is always one of availability. Because iron is one of the <"most abundant elements on earth"> we know that presence isn't the issue, just availability.
........... That is the one, it is why all these old tropical soils are red and quartz rich, everything that is potentially soluble has been washed away, just leaving insoluble quartz and iron (& aluminium) oxides & hydroxides. The iron can't be plant available, or it would have been leached away over the millennia. You can legitimately call "Flourite" "iron rich", but so is a <"red house brick"> and the iron is equally soluble in either case........
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Plants from oxygenated, alkaline water always have the issue of iron scarcity and have developed mechanisms to harvest any iron ions that fleetingly becomes available. The opposite is true for plants from peat bogs ("ombrotrophic mires"), or deep anaerobic sediments, <"they have mechanisms"> to oxidise and exclude iron ions.

cheers Darrel
 
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From my little and failure experiences, only few plants struggle in hard water, tonina, myriophyllum tuberculatum for exemple are impossible in hard water. I thought rotala walichii was impossible in hard water but i manage to grow it maybe not in the best condition but she grows with minor stunt, maybe 1 of 10 is stunted. CO2 need to be perfect which is hell on earth.

Soil is playing a huge part, hard water with sand is the hardest condition, but if you use hard water with clay based soil, it's way easier. As said above, iron have hard time in hard water, to solve that issue, i added tetra sticks (thanks to that fabulous board) in the bottom topped with clay, that way plant get iron from here and i don't have to worry a lot for few months.
 
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