Why do the "friend's" plants recover better?

I am an old aquarium enthusiast, and so I experienced the time when the Internet didn't even exist in dreams!

Aquarists were reduced to trusting the merchant (sometimes it was the same store that did the hunting and fishing!), and buying very expensive books or borrowing them from the public library.

"Therefore, it is impossible to obtain most species of fish or plants that are a little less common than the guppy or the angelfish!"

 

The suppliers, apart from the merchant whose advice was very questionable, were often just friends. We would go have a snack after school at a friend's place, we would spend a good hour together looking at his aquarium, dreaming of everything we didn’t have, and looking for what he could provide us that we didn’t have.

Often, we would leave with a few plants that we had found particularly lush in his aquarium, and which he therefore had in abundance.

 

What we noticed was that those plants, the ones "from the buddy", generally thrived much better than those from the merchant, which often languished and disappeared over time. Those never lived up to the promises of the photos in the book or the merchant's poster!

Since then, I have always been struck by that.

Ah! This Java moss from my friend Olivier, and these cryptocorynes from my buddy Pierre!

 

"The explanation, I have only been discovering it for about ten years, with the insights offered by very recent agronomic advances."

As a trained agricultural engineer, I closely follow the current discoveries regarding the microbiota (the "rhizosphere") of plants.

Some conifers that the colonists had brought from Europe to America to produce wood did not grow there and died quickly. But when these same colonists brought a bit of their original soil, in sufficient quantity to remain "alive" and moist, everything changed! For the microorganisms necessary for this species of trees did not exist in America, and therefore the trees did not grow.

"My experience in aquariums shows me that aquatic plants experience comparable phenomena."

The plant of the merchant of my youth, grown in Holland, uprooted and washed, taken from the wholesaler to the store, no longer had its microbiome that it loved so much. The shock of replanting was enormous, and it rarely overcame it.

Similarly, when it was grown "in vitro". This laboratory culture technique aims to avoid any algae, any contamination. But it precisely ignores that a plant grows, once it leaves the lab, amidst microorganisms and thanks to them. Life in the laboratory did not teach it to live with them.

'My friends' plants only had to cross the street in an old mustard pot with a bit of their sand and water!'

 

Since the creation of Aquazolla, I visually inspect the plants in the light (to remove any potential foreign bodies), but I forbid myself from washing them, let alone "disinfecting" them. This would deprive them of the millions of friendly bacteria that have allowed them to grow so well, present on the roots, but also on the entire surface of the leaves.

Life is beautiful, it is complex, and wanting to make it too simple does not do it justice!