The notion that giving sugars to healthy growing plants will somehow improve their growth rate or help balance nutrient status is a completely unproven conjecture. Don’t be fooled; sugar fed to plants does not increase the soluble sugar inside plant tissues nor will it increase trichome density or resin production. Aside from this fact, feeding external sources of sugar actually affects the osmotic process and inhibits the plants ability to uptake water and bio available nutrients as a result.
It is pseudoscientific nonsense to make such claims. There are no scientific studies that prove this is true and so no other agricultural crops are fed sugars by their growers. One example disproving this idea is shown here:
http://cropwatch.unl.edu/research-sugar-application-crops
This idea was invented by unscrupulous manufacturers of products used by cannabis growers to sell sugar-water or dry table-sugar to uninformed growers. Plants do not work that way, nor do root systems absorb sugars as described on the labels of products called “Carbo Load” and “Sweet”. These sugar-containing liquid products are also full of preservatives like methyl paraben and sodium benzoate which are unlisted ingredients used to extend shelf life.
The notion to feed plants sugars was extrapolated from a few facts about measuring the brix of plant sap or fruit crops such as grapes. The nutritional health and physiological state of crops can be deduced from the sucrose and calcium levels found in plant tissues (ie: “brix”); higher sucrose and calcium means a higher quality crop but you can’t cheat the process. Grape growers don’t feed sugars to their grapes to increase brix levels, so why would any grower try this? Perhaps someone got trichomes confused with sugar crystals and thought they could sell this idea; but trichomes are not made of sugar.
Remember that 45% of the weight of a dried bud of cannabis bud is made up of just from carbon, and all of this carbon was pulled out of the air as CO2. Carbon dioxide gas is where plants obtain their carbon for making sugars and cannabinoids, not from some sugar water given to roots. The opposite is true; plants will exude the excess carbohydrates from photosynthesis out of their roots to attract beneficial microbes, but they don’t uptake take sugars through roots.
Some sugar-based products claim to include “complex carbohydrates” or plant-specific sugars such as arabinose, xylose or rhamnose which is entirely false. These carbohydrates are synthesized by plants for use in cell walls and are very expensive to buy from laboratory suppliers; no one would pay the price for these sugars if they ever were in the products. These precious cell-wall carbohydrates will never enter plant roots, if they ever were used in such a manner, and will not become plant cell-wall components when given to roots.
Any sugar that enters the rhizosphere will be food for bacteria and fungi, and not the plants. Just like sugars used in microbiological petri plate culture, when adding molasses or glucose to the fertigation water one is only feeding the microbes in the soil. One might consider this as beneficial, especially if this boosts the growth of beneficial plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR), but even boosting microbe growth has negative side effects.
A direct consequence of feeding sugars to the rhizosphere is a drastic drop in soil pH. Bacteria and fungi will grow many times faster when given extra sugars, but then their boosted life-cycles and excessive growth will acidify the soil.
This can be proven easily by adding sugar or molasses to a compost tea; overnight the pH will drop a whole point or more as the microbes go through a surge in growth and exude organic acids as by-products of their life cycle. Sugars might even encourage pathogens to grow instead of beneficial PGPR. A healthy rhizosphere pH has a wide range of 5.2 – 6.1, but sugars will make it plummet to 4.2.
There is science to enlighten us on this topic, and one review article is found here;
Sugars made by plants through photosynthesis and other internal metabolic pathways are investments of energy, and cells use these sugars as signals to affect other metabolic events. A quote from the above article reminds us:
“Sugars in general can act as signalling molecules and/or as global regulators of gene expression, for example acting like hormones and translating nutrient status to regulation of growth and the floral transition”
So imagine if after dumping a huge amount of sugars into the soil and the plant actually could uptake these carbohydrates, plants would have their internal regulatory mechanisms go haywire. The carbon to nitrogen ratio in plant tissues is balanced very specifically, and plant tissues at vegetative or blooming stages of growth have different C:N ratios. Carbohydrate status is not to be messed with, nor can it be altered without disrupting healthy growth.
The scientific paper cited above describes how carbohydrate and hormone metabolic pathways “cross talk” to control plant growth very tightly:
” Sugar-based signalling pathways cross-talk with various hormones to modulate critical aspects of plant growth. In general, plants defective in abscisic acid (ABA) and/or ethylene perception and signalling tend to display altered sugar response phenotypes.”
Furthermore other studies “have revealed extensive overlap between sugar, ABA, and ethylene signals in controlling processes such as seed germination and seedling growth… In response to sugar depletion, genes involved in photosynthesis, carbohydrate remobilization and export, and nitrogen (N) metabolism tend to be up-regulated. Alternatively, sugar abundance induces typical sink organ activities such as carbohydrate import, utilization, and storage, and starch and anthocyanin biosynthesis.”
If they could enter plants through their roots, more sugars would be a negative feedback signal to stop synthesizing sugars. If plants were sensitive to sugars fed to their roots their cellular metabolic pathways would be flung out of control. Luckily roots are not able to uptake a flood of sugars; healthy growth results from trying to maintain metabolic homeostasis and having gradients of sugars moving around the plant in response to the growing environment.
Trichomes are shiny and transparent due to their composition being mostly silicates and carbonates. They look like crystals but they are not sugar crystals, and nothing about cannabis cultivation is enhanced by adding glucose, molasses or “sweet nectar” of any kind to the fertigation regimen.
