Thread by @eigenrobot

gentlemen its time for some wet chemistry

heres our patient, one lovely little blueberry bush

the red leaves indicate an iron deficiency caused by insufficiently acidic soil

we're gonna try to bring down the pH with a high molar citric acid buffer

wait is it necessary to use the conjugate base here? like sodium citrate instead of sodium hydroxide?

hmmmmm

well fuck

no thats nonsense i shouldnt have read anything. ok anyway let's begin

citric acid is 258.06 g/mol

i have 340.2g so if i dump this stuff in a liter of water i get a 1.3 molar solution

should be good to dissolve

my root watering thing is 56oz

tbh im gonna just eyeball it

step one add acid

step two. make sure its working with a Scientific test

interestingly looks like its sub-2 pH

well

we wanna bring it up a bit i think, i dont wanna fuck up the roots which prefer pH between 4.0 and 5.5

lye is REALLY nasty stuff and i will not be tasting this solution

im also gonna mix it with heavy chemical gloves on and with baking soda on hand

you like

like in the movie

first try got ph near 14

ok now to slowly add it to the acid until ph up around 4

all right

took more lye than id expected, a Lot more lye

and there were some oopsies along the way

but at last its time to attend to our patient!

well hopefully i didnt kill the plant

one thing i wish id done was wait 20m to add it so that the solution cooled off

adding a strong base to a weak acid is pretty exothermic and the water was fairly warm although hopefully thermal mass wasnt much relative to the soil

going forward i think it makes more sense to just mix some citric acid up at a lower concentration and just water using that

seems less risky and much easier regardless

anyway this concludes DIY soil chemistry. cheers all

well its not dead but its not better either

ill test a soil sample later to see whether it took in the short term

regardless i also ordered a big bag of citric acid to dissolve and use in regular waterings

i want to get the pH of the entire bed down to provide a nice environment for the blueberry roots

also sick plant is in the ground where the concrete thing was :/

@liviadrusilla90 interesting point about the breakdown though. hmmm. hmmmmmmmmmmm

guess ill look into the other options, thank you :)

extremely good point that the citrate is going to biodegrade quickly and so isnt a good long-term solution

I'd seen the biodegredation as a positive but realistically . . . maybe not so much

took a soil sample near the base of the blueberry where i poured the acid, and another from a few feet away where i put some sulfur a few weeks ago

blueberry base soil was ~pH 5 and the other stuff looked around pH6

so plausibly I dropped local pH by a full point

pH 5 is low enough for iron uptake to resume in the blueberry but given that it's temporary and given that the plant is already low on iron, going to go back and add (1) more iron fertilizer to increase availability and (2) more sulfur to maintain and drive longer term changes

ok so check this out

before in quoted tweet

lets see our lovely fellow today

NOT BAD NOT BAD AT ALL

remember this thread the next time someone tells you you cant solve problems by mixing household chemicals with half-remembered decades old knowledge

@threadreaderapp unroll