Home Vegetable Gardening: Phosphorus Is Necessary for Seed and Root Development
Phosphorus is very important in the early stages of vegetable plant development. Plants need this element in order to sustain good root development. If phosphorus is in short supply in your soil, your vegetable plant’s growth will slow very quickly or even worse, not grow at all.
A common appearance of lack of phosphorous in your soil is streaks of purple up and down stems or on the leaves and low yield of fruits and vegetables.
Phosphorus makes up one of the five elements needed in plant DNA for the process of photosynthesis, with the other four being carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. All of the pieces to this puzzle must be in place, otherwise during seed development the plant’s DNA will not form properly. (more…)