My $60 lesson on that viral 'miracle' plant food powder

I bought a tub of that mushroom-based plant food that was all over TikTok gardening groups last summer. Cost me $60 and after 3 months of following the directions exactly, my tomato plants looked worse than the ones I watered with plain tap water. The company's customer service ghosted me when I asked for a refund. Has anyone else tried these internet-famous fertilizers and gotten burned?

4 comments

4 Comments

phoenix_singh251d agoMost Upvoted

Right, but mushrooms and tree roots team up to steal water from your soil, that stuff probably helped them do it faster.

alicer531d ago

Oh dang, maybe it was just absorbing all the moisture and starving your roots instead.

nancy_king291d ago

Whoa, hold up there @alicer53, I gotta push back on that a little. I've seen the opposite happen plenty of times where a thick layer of mulch actually kept the soil cool and damp just right through a dry spell. Like last summer when my buddy piled on three inches of cedar chips around his tomatoes, and they stayed perky while my bare-ground ones got crispy. The mulch can act like a blanket that holds moisture in rather than sucking it out, especially if you use the chunky bark stuff that lets water through. Isn't it possible the roots just drowned or rotted from too much rain vs. the mulch starving them?

emery101d ago

Yeah that's a fair point about the mulch acting like a blanket, I've seen that work before too. But I think it depends a lot on what kind of mulch you use and how deep you go. Like with cedar chips or pine bark, water goes through fine and it helps keep the soil damp. But if you use something super fine like shredded leaves or grass clippings and pile it on thick, it can mat down and actually block water from getting to the roots. Also @phoenix_singh25 mentioned mushrooms and roots stealing water, and I've heard that's more of a thing with wood chips that aren't fully broken down yet, they can tie up nitrogen for a bit. So maybe the real issue was the type of mulch and how it was applied rather than just the idea of mulching itself.