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Is Distilled Water Good For Plants? Is Tap Water Bad For Plants? Does Chlorine Harm Plants?
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Apr 27, 2022
Have you ever wondered what is the best water for your plants? This gardening in Canada video is going to look at the benefits of using different water types on your plants. We will be looking at whether or not distilled water is worth it when it comes to watering plants. If tap water is harmful to plants. And even if reverse osmosis is beneficial to use with houseplants. Lastly we will look at how to remove chlorine and chloramine from tap water before using it on plants. ?Join our monthly newsletter! newsletter.gardeningincanada.net Website/Blog & FREE printables: https://gardeningincanada.net —————— ?? Grab your at home Garden Soil Testing Workbook! https://etsy.me/3dW5HLg ————— ??Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/gardeningincanada ————— Amazon Affiliate: pH Meter: https://geni.us/ZXQx0S Fungus Gnat, Thrip control: https://geni.us/SBDgp
View Video Transcript
0:00
Hello plant people how are you guys doing today if you're new around here my name is Ashley and I'm a soil scientist on this channel
0:05
I like to take that science and apply it to all things plants and in today's video
0:09
We're gonna be talking about water and specifically distilled first reverse osmosis first spring water
0:15
verse tap water and which one is best for your plants both indoors and
0:20
Outside and we're gonna get into this science of this So this isn't going to be I think or I feel this is going to be hard facts as to which one is best
0:28
for your plants and also for your soil because there is a slight difference
0:33
between the two so the best way to identify which type of water is best for
0:37
your plants is to first identify the differences in chemical or structural
0:42
makeup between all the different types and how they are made so first up is
0:47
distilled water and I think this is the one I hear people watering with most
0:51
commonly and so distilled water is simply water that can be tap water or
0:57
spring water that heat is applied to and the liquid is turned into a vapor and then back into
1:03
a liquid again ultimately leaving behind any heavy metals microbes anything that cannot be
1:11
put into water vapor is simply left behind in the original distiller and the new water or the fresh
1:19
water is on the other side so it's very similar to what clouds are doing with oceans and lakes
1:24
around us so very similar concept and that is what distilled water is there's no filters involved
1:30
with distilled water the other option is reverse osmosis water so to reverse osmosis is also
1:37
considered deionized water and so this involves no heating but it does involve a series of different
1:46
filters that are very very fine so it is on average expected that reverse osmosis water
1:53
removes 90 something percent it's like 99 of all minerals viruses bacteria microbes from the water
2:04
leaving you behind relatively pure h2o so distilled and reverse osmosis are very similar in a lot of
2:14
ways keep in mind that reverse and distilled does not have any minerals in it so it doesn't have
2:22
calcium magnesium helpful minerals but it also doesn't have harmful minerals such as lead or
2:29
arsenic for example it's not uncommon for reverse osmosis in particular to be considered dead water
2:36
and it's actually to the point where the world health organization says right on their website
2:40
that it is ill-advised to actually consume reverse osmosis water because of the lack of minerals in
2:48
it water has a charge to it or a ph to it that makes it want to have dissolved minerals in it
2:54
so when we remove dissolved minerals from the system when it passes through a body system a
3:01
plant system a soil system it's going to try to grab as many dissolvable minerals as it possibly
3:07
can to help neutralize or equalize its chemistry so that why we consider distilled or reverse osmosis unsafe to drink in large quantities or overextended periods of time And we generally call it dead water because
3:22
it doesn't have the much needed nutrients on a micro side that human bodies need. So because we
3:29
are missing so many minerals that are typically positively charged, similar to what we see in the
3:34
soil, calcium, for example, manganese, magnesium, zinc, boron, those are all positively charged
3:40
mineral ions. And so when we are missing those positively charged ions, we end up with a water
3:48
or a soil that is void and craving those positive charges. So as it passes through the soil system
3:56
if it's reintroduced to other water, the human body, plants, it's going to try to attract those
4:01
towards it if it doesn't have those minerals available to it it is considered acidic on the
4:07
ph range so it starts dipping below that seven mark so for some of us this may be beneficial
4:13
especially if we have plants that need acidic water but overall generally speaking water ph
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isn't going to make that big of a difference in a garden format for sure it will not make a
4:27
difference your pH is more determined by your parent material and then on the
4:30
potting soil side that dip into more acidic ranges isn't going to affect it
4:36
too too much because your potting soil in general is already relatively acidic
4:40
because it's probably peat based or coconut coir based so this brings us to
4:44
our third option which is spring water and we see spring water all the time and
4:49
this spring water does have minerals in it the reason why it has minerals in it
4:53
is because spring water in canada anyways has to be taken from an underground spring and the least
5:01
amount of manipulation can be done to it so whatever is naturally present underground will
5:07
be present in your bottle of water the exception to this is that there may be some ozone in it and
5:13
ozone is essentially an addition of an oxygen compound and the oxygen compound is more so for
5:20
flavor smell taste that sort of thing there is also very low but some levels
5:26
of fluoride and fluoride is a naturally occurring element and therefore what's
5:31
in spring water is naturally occurring fluoride it's not added and that's
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especially true in Canada fun fact when I was actually researching for this video
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did you know that the photo on the outside like the label on the outside of
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your spring water has to match the landscape of that has to match what's in
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the bottle so if you have a spring water from Saskatchewan and it's not showing
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you a prairie field that can actually be taken by the food inspection agency in
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Canada and you can get slapped with a major fine because it's considered false
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advertising so when you see a mountain range on the outside of a Canadian
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package of water that's actually the mountain range that that spring water was taken from
6:18
Just total side note. So because spring water does have the actual ions or the metals or minerals inside of it we have a more alkaline water and that because we have more the positively charged ions incorporated into the system now what the difference between tap water and spring water
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and the truth here is not much because most lakes rivers and sources of tap water come from spring
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water sources so because of that um there is some alterations that are done you know such as chloramine
6:54
or chlorine being added and that's what makes it slightly different is the higher salt so tap water
7:01
and spring water are similar there is added salts in tap water to help with the purification process
7:07
there also is some added fluoride and they do that because of dental reasons they say so um
7:13
they've done studies and they show that if there's more fluoride in the water when you go to drink it
7:17
that people populations that have that have better teeth I I know there's a
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whole other side of that story but I'm not gonna get into that today so that
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leads us to our next question which is is chlorine harmful to plants and the
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answer is not really so they've done quite a few studies on both chlorine and
7:42
core mean to look at whether or not it affects plants and one of the most
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popular studies done was using 100 parts per million on plants and parts per
7:52
million of chlorine in the water on plants and the results were that the
7:58
plants were completely fine there was another group that pushed it just a next
8:02
step further and they did 150 parts per million in the water for I think a
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hundred and fifty or some days and they actually rested for two days and within
8:13
two days all the soil microbiology throughout the entire soil profile had
8:17
actually bounced back and less than two days it was back to its original
8:21
populations so that does tell us that if we're continually watering with a
8:26
chlorinated or chloramine water is that our micro populations will decrease over
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time because those salts do kill the microbes off however give it a little
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bit of a rest two days and they'll bounce right back so for most of us in
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our case we are watering every day especially with house plants we're watering maybe once a month so we'll have a 24 hour period where we'll have
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lower microbial activity but within 24 hours we will have full-blown microbial
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activity until the next time we decide to water with our tap water so say you
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have a plant that you know cannot take any sort of chlorine or chloramine how
9:03
do you remove it well the easy answer to this is if your city does use chlorine
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and you can do a quick google on what your city does use it actually is very volatile product and
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so it will gas off overnight if you just leave your water and can out for 24 hours your chlorine
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will be completely not present any longer now the in canada i it's like 25 and most of that 25
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is the major cities use chloramine which is not chlorine so i've seen this on platforms i've seen
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this on Facebook group pages where they talking about just leave the cup out and the chloramine will gas off like the chlorine and it it a drastically different compound so while some will gas off most of it will not
9:51
and this is when you insert carbon filter so if you use a carbon filter to
9:57
actually pour the water through such as a Brita filter you can remove chloramine
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so just to drive this point home I did do some research on how much chloramine
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the Brita filters have removed and through independent studies they have tested it to be 99.97% effective in removing all chloramine from your water
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which is basically zero so the only one that was like slightly better by a tenth
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of a percent was the one that goes on directly on the tap and not the one that
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goes in the fridge so the one on the tap is like a tenth of a percent better
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than the actual container itself so if you really want to make sure you don't
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have salt you have specialty plant or you're noticing chlorine toxicity then
10:42
this is the answer so how do you identify chlorine toxicity and it's very
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easy it is just simply chlorosis now it's pretty unlikely that you were ever
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going to see this it's going to take very very high levels of chlorine for
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happen but I will read off what one study found in regards to what this
11:03
looked like the process of chlorosis is simply just the yellowing of the leaves
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with bright green veins going through it now I would urge you to think of maybe
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other reasons why you may have chlorosis such as over watering for example
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could be a reason for chlorosis and that's probably be more likely of the two
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so just keep that in mind but there you guys have it and in complete guide to
11:28
water and watering plants so in conclusion the ultimate solution is actually technically spring watered or tap water that has been run through a
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Brita filter reverse osmosis and distilled water will leach minerals from the soil and potentially from your plants because they are completely
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deionized which is the opposite of what you want especially when it comes to
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those lovely micronutrients that you know are not so easily replaced in the
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soil so keep that in mind also the pH of those two is less than ideal we don't
12:02
want acidic soil we want to try to avoid that when possible we want just slightly
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acidic just just below seven not much much more or seven would be ultimately
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perfect and I did a whole video on pH and plants so go check that out if you
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want to learn more about pH and pH of your soil and nutrients and all that fun
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stuff be sure to hit that subscribe button give this video a thumbs up and
12:26
let me know in the comments down below what you use to water your plants and what you've noticed when you've chosen that choice I will talk to you guys next
12:33
time bye Thank you
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