- Author: Mark Bolda
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:
http://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=13163
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
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.