Is tap water good for plants? In the general the answer isn’t inline with what your water department nor local hippe will say. The facts is chlorinated water is not safe for the microbiology that feeds your plant nor is it worse than letting your plant dry up til the next rain. Chlorine kills the surface level microbiology in a lite watering and kills lower levels in a heavy watering. Chlorine is used to kill bacteria and keep humans safe from what can live in our water that’s it. The water department does not exist to provide plants safe water, you do.
Soon after watering the microbiology starts to replace itself and will eventually restore itself to natural populations. In the meantime the feeding of the plant is disrupted because the balance of life in the pot has been disrupted. For years I couldn’t figure out why my potted planted needed so much fertilizer but than it became obvious that there are 2 ways to feed a plant.
1. Human Fertilizer: This is the unsustainable method fertilizer companies prefer you to choose. It is you putting select or diverse selection of minerals in on the soil and washing them past the plants roots.
2. Mychorrhizal Feeding: The natural method how plants have eaten for years. This method is a symbiotic relationship between the plants roots and colonies of mychorrhizal fungi allowing the plant to communicate exactly what nutrients it needs and the fungi pull it from the surrounding microbiology.
When people tell me they don’t have a green thumb the first question I ask is how are you plants fed? Do they eat what they request or what is given to them? Is tap water good for plants? “Nature has been nature for at least a billion years while mans been around for only a few moments, so I’m pretty sure it’s fertilizing method is a tad more healthy for the plant.” The fungi doesn’t take vacations nor forget to fertilize else it would die also.
So is tap water good for plants? Anything that kills the microbiology sustaining the plant like anything killing the microbiology sustaining a human is a bad thing if life it the goal. There are times when soil like a human(anti-biotics) can benefit from sterilization but it’s far and few between certainly not multiple times a day. I only use tap water when I’m inoculating a batch of soil from pest or for cuttings, while I used to use hydrogen peroxide but now tap water has the same effect. There are many a hints there about keeping tap water away from biospheres or mammals that survives by probiotics.
