Nitrogen-fixing trees “eat” rocks, play pivotal role in forest health
today.oregonstate.edu
today.oregonstate.edu
To bring it back to HN, I keep thinking there must be ways to model landscapes, and planting strategies to increase permaculture efficiency, although probably the antithesis of permaculture.
The issue seems to be putting plants together so they can support each other in close quarters, sounds like an optimisation problem to me, I've called it augmented permaculture before.
In fact, I thought about creating a "digital twin" for your edible landscape, and wrote about it here: https://automicrofarm.com/blog/2018/11/digital-twin.html
The amount of rubbish I've heard spouted by gardeners about what you should and shouldn't do is crazy.
And I'm not even talking about the more 'spiritual' side. Even seemingly mainstream type stuff like companion planting isn't internally consistent.
"red alder ... through its symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria"
That's more like it. No such thing as a nitrogen-fixing tree, as far as we know; only micro-organisms perform nitrogen fixation.
Actually this article and study is not intending to reveal anything new about how trees and other plants fix nitrogen (using microbes). It is revealing that the symbiotic arrangements (far from entirely understood) also cause the breakdown and release of scarce nutrients from rocks, enabling increased growth and building soil fertility over time.
Digestion, as such, is a concept independent of gut bacteria.
Dairy farmers produce milk, gardeners grow plants, I brew beer.
Creating a situation where something you want to happen, happens, generally means attributing the thing to whoever set the situation up.
A dairy farm produces milk, but it doesn't lactate. Gardeners do not photosynthesize.
And that's assuming we're living in a world where you can petition the World English Language Governing Body to make the necessary changes to the language.
But for better or worse that body doesn't exist so we are stuck with what we've got, and at the moment people talk about nitrogen fixing plants, so if you want to communicate with people, you need to use those terms.
That isn't clickbait, that's just making sure a headline doesn't turn into an off topic essay.
Of course, I would say that the tree is being fertilized or receiving fertilization, not that it's fertilizing.
The effect of the bacteria can be replaced by animal waste, decaying biological matter, or the application of a commercial fertilizer.
> self fertilising
That would be false and absurd; it means that the plant is decomposing in order to feed itself.
> and at the moment people talk about nitrogen-fixing plants.
Not people who can pass a fifth grade science exam. Nothing to do with English usage. "Nitrogen-fixing credit card" is grammatical English.