This is a strange one to most people, the idea of watering our plants with ocean water, also referred to as sea minerals or sea solids.

The most common questions are:
1. Isn’t it too salty?
2. Isn’t the ocean polluted?
3. Why should I pay for ocean water (this one comes especially from those on the coast)?

Here are the answers:
1. Nope, not too salty. The sodium is buffered by the other 90+ minerals present in the water. In fact, the mineral makeup of sea minerals is strikingly close to our blood.
2. Well yes, the ocean is extremely polluted in some places and not so bad in others. This product comes from pristine waters. You probably wouldn’t want to take water from too close to a major centre, although depending on the circumstances, the minerals might be worth the associated problems.
3. Over fifty years of research says it would be an excellent idea to pay for ocean water if you want healthy soil and crops. The ocean water in this particular product is from an area deep in the pacific where pollution is not a factor. They actually use GPS to find clean and especially nutrient dense water. Then they concentrate it way down so that many gallons of ocean water become one gallon of product. They also do something to get rid of some of the sodium, although this was not always done in the research, and there still were no salt problems.

Maynard Murray is the gentleman who did many of the experiments, along with his associates and many followers. He was a doctor who became fascinated with the fact there was practically no disease in animals in the sea. No cancer, no heart disease, no arthritis, nothing. Elderly whales had the same level of health as baby whales. Trout lived many times longer than lake trout and didn’t develop cancer, whereas lake trout mostly did get cancer of the liver after about five and a half years.

I just finished reading ‘Fertility from the Ocean Deep’ by Charles Walters. It chronicles the life of Maynard Murray and discusses many of the hundreds of experiments that were done over the years. The results are unbelievable. Murray’s own book ‘Sea Energy Agriculture’ is another classic on the subject.

I won’t go into those studies here, but I thought I’d mention a couple of interesting independent trials done with the particular sea water product I carry called Sea-Crop.

1. A trial on tomatoes saw an 89% increase in the number of tomatoes and a 44% increase in the size of tomatoes over the control. It looks to me like they received only 3 very diluted applications of Sea-Crop. http://sea-crop.com/trials-microtom-tomato.html. Interestingly, both the control and the sea minerals tomatoes also received applications of molasses. I’ve been telling people that molasses is a superior product to bring into the garden, but it’s another one of those strange sounding practices. That’s for another newsletter.

2. At Louisiana State University, veggie transplants were merely dipped in a 0.5% Sea-Crop solution (ie. diluted 1:200 with water) and planted in nematode infested soil, with the following increases in marketable fruit over the control:

  • Eggplants – 66%
  • Tomatoes – 30%
  • Peppers – 71%
  • Strawberries – 25%

3. At Morocco University, Sea-Crop was used as a soil drench on runner beans in the two leaf stage after emergence and as a foliar spray three and six weeks after that. Total Sea-Crop usage was three gallons per acre and the increase in marketable fruit was 86%!

There are just a few examples of what can happen when plants have the nutrients they need. And I’m only talking about yield here. What else happens when plants have the nutrients? Do they get attacked by insects and diseases? Forget about it. How do they taste? Like food! They store longer, they’re more drought tolerant, etc. The lists goes on and on.

And this doesn’t apply only to food crops. A lawn is not really all that different than a vegetable garden. They’re all plants and they all need nutrients.

Tip: I have recently learned that it is perhaps a good idea to avoid mixing sea minerals with liquid fish hydrolysate, as it may decrease the effectiveness of the Sea-Crop. This was news to me, as I had always mixed them. It may not even be a problem, and it would probably be a good thing to test out, but for now, I think it’s a good idea to apply them separately, even if it’s one after the other. I don’t see kelp being a problem, since we use only 20ml per 1000sqft. Humic acids are still great, as is molasses, compost tea, and probably diluted EM.