'a silicate is not water soluble as would be a salt, which prevents glauconite in its natural form from being useful as a fertilizer'
Not so, all you'd need to do is grind it to uniform fineness, spread it and the nutrient is available to plant roots, which have little animalitos and/or plantitas helping them eat rock, believe it or not [grains the size of sand being merely small rocks]
Greensand has been used as K-content fertiliser for over two hundred years, in fact before they knew why it worked, long before Liebig and it was one of the first he studied ... there's a good page on this on some university site, forget where ... in silicate form the nutrient is very slowly soluble, but that's the beauty, it won't leach out in the first rains, it stays available to roots which sidle up alongside grains and sort of suck on it [that's suck in the high-church scientific sense] ... roots can get at goodies that water cannot, and that's a good thing, otherwise all the goodies would be washed into the salt chuck already
Simply grinding and spreading might not be the most economic way to use the resource, however ... mixing in other essentials, concentrating it some maybe, then fritting the stuff to predictable release durations will make it more valuable, for sure |
