SuperThrive skepticism

From: Lester Kallus lkallus at earthlink.net> on 2001.05.10 at 21:12:02(6412) You'll have to pardon my skepticism on SuperThrive - a product which I have tried but have since abandoned. Actually, the ingredients were not a secret on the bottle I purchased. They were listed right there on the label. The print, of course, was very tiny. A friend who's a Professor of Botany looked at the SuperThrive ingredients and agreed that the ingredients fell into 2 classes, a vitamin and a rooting hormone.. +More I then researched the product in a toxic ingestion database and found the ingredients to include: 1-NAPHYTHYL ACETIC ACID 0.024% VITAMIN B1 0.09% This is the undiluted product which, once diluted, becomes a very dilute solution of each of the two ingredients.. She had discounted any benefit to the vitamin saying that plants do not need to absorb them but rather make their own. It's much like a human taking Vitamin D supplements - the human body makes all the vitamin D it needs if only exposed to sunlight or some other UV source. (Incidentally, for anyone who wonders that's why there are few vitamin supplements these days with any significant dose of vitamin D in them given that megadosing would be deleterious.) In this case, of course, we're talking about B1 & plants, but I believe the same principle applies. She did indicate that the SuperThrive rooting hormone might help some young plants that hadn't grown a full set of roots yet but doubted there'd be any benefit to established plants. Now if she were wrong and plants actually did benefit from exogenous vitamins, I'd have two comments. The first is: why wouldn't companies like Scott's have jumped on the wagon and made their own vitamin and hormone supplementation for plants. There's no way anyone can place a patent on either of the ingredients. The second is: why pay a fortune for a vitamin solution. Why not just steal one of your kid's Fred Flinstone vitamins, dissolve it in water and pour that over the plant. After all, the SuperThrive website does say that it's so benign that you can make a concentration 4500 greater than recommend and not injure the plant. Perhaps what's helping newly planted tubers is the rooting hormone component and that, at least, makes some scientific sense. Regardless, there have to be cheaper sources. If people are still convinced there's miraculous value to SuperThrive, I'd like them to remember that I live in New York and that I've heard there's this bridge being sold at an amazingly low price... Les

Note: this is a very old post, so no reply function is available.