toshiba

in the beginning of this thread, are you taking about sweetleaf from AN?

AN is expensive , but i would assume molasses is molasses. wether not its from AN or from the grocrey store, AN's should work jsut as well.

some people have a hate toward AN, but they can grow mj plants.

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all i'm saying is if some tribe out in africa knew a stars density and orbit rotation thousands of years ago, im gonna have to believe them on pot .. me

I would like to think of myself as someone important, a Herbologist.. me

Trim

Stumbled in here, cause I found a beet molasses based organic liquid in the dollar store. I've been organic gardening for years, and have a huge compost bin.


In the fall, I get a couple hundred pounds of worm castings....I stumbled across this tea maker years ago, and thought I'd share the link.

It sounds like the benefits from worm tea are very similar to what I've read here about molasses.


Anyway, I know a lot of you are indoors types, so you wouldn't dare try this. But whether you're growing tomatoes, or herbs outdoors, you might want to check out this link....


And thanks for the info on molasses...I went back and cleaned the shelves of the dollar store molasses!


Deuley's Own - Media

hydroherb

That's the truth.

But despite what the original post says, AN's Carboload is hardly the same thing as molasses. This article is copied all over the place but it's still wrong. If you don't believe me, take a look at Carboload sometime. It's completely different. It doesn't look, smell or - I presume - taste anything like molasses.


Trim -
I'd say that worm tea is probably universally better than molasses, but that's my opinion. I'd hesitate to use molasses in a foliar spray but worm tea is amazing in that capacity. Plus you simply can't overfeed a plant with worm tea, and too much of it doesn't promote the growth of harmful microbes or attract bugs (quite the opposite on bugs, in fact.)

Trim

Agreed...And, if you're in a situation where there are bear lurking, you might end up regretting the use of the molasses.

I'll still use the molasses I bought, as it was a closeout price, and it seems to be beneficial. I will however, be careful not to overuse it.

Oh So Grow So

I appoligize if this got cleared up in the first post or the following posts, but did anyone ever say whether you can use BSM in hydro? specifically DWC?

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All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume

Top 44 / Afghani / DWC

DWC: clones(bigbud)/seedlings(ww) saved during fire dept inspection

How to take good pictures under HPS lighting

My thoughts on proper Vaporizing

johnny-0

Thanks Profound-I knew there was a good reason Ive been using BS molassas for years.

Profound

The Murky World of High Fructose Corn Syrup

We’ve been working to decide if the 3LB molasses manual is in need of revision or if it needs to be totally rewritten, because in the 4+ years since it was first written, we’ve continued to research soil sweeteners and discuss them with a variety of gardeners. We’ve also compiled a bit more information on other alternative sugar sources, learning that some growers in commercial agriculture use sucrose or table sugar as an alternative to molasses. Some growers have inquired about alternative sugar sources such as honey or maple syrup, so we certainly hope to at least touch on those topics as this guide is reworked or revised.

And finally there is a growing debate in North America about the use of High-Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) in our foods, and yes even in our gardens. We’ve encountered individuals using High-Fructose Corn Syrup as a molasses alternative, so we’ll try and give HFCS the 3LB treatment as a part of that upcoming molasses manual update/upgrade.

Until those revisions are complete, we wanted to give our readers a bird’s eye view at one of the articles we archived as we were researching HFCS sweeteners.


In the Kitchen with Mother Linda
The Murky World of High Fructose Corn Syrup
By Linda Joyce Forristal, CCP, MTA


Think of sugar and you think of sugar cane or beets. Extraction of sugar from sugar cane spurred the colonization of the New World. Extraction of sugar from beets was developed during the time of Napoleon so that the French could have sugar in spite of the English trading blockade.

Nobody thinks of sugar when they see a field of corn. Most of us would be surprised to learn that the larger percentage of sweeteners used in processed food comes from corn, not sugar cane or beets.

The process for making the sweetener high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) out of corn was developed in the 1970s. Use of HFCS grew rapidly, from less than three million short tons in 1980 to almost 8 million short tons in 1995. During the late 1990s, use of sugar actually declined as it was eclipsed by HFCS. Today Americans consume more HFCS than sugar.

High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is produced by processing corn starch to yield glucose, and then processing the glucose to produce a high percentage of fructose. It all sounds rather simple–white cornstarch is turned into crystal clear syrup. However, the process is actually very complicated. Three different enzymes are needed to break down cornstarch, which is composed of chains of glucose molecules of almost infinite length, into the simple sugars glucose and fructose.

First, cornstarch is treated with alpha-amylase to produce shorter chains of sugars called polysaccharides. Alpha-amylase is industrially produced by a bacterium, usually Bacillus sp. It is purified and then shipped to HFCS manufacturers.

Next, an enzyme called glucoamylase breaks the sugar chains down even further to yield the simple sugar glucose. Unlike alpha-amylase, glucoamylase is produced by Aspergillus, a fungus, in a fermentation vat where one would likely see little balls of Aspergillus floating on the top.

The third enzyme, glucose-isomerase, is very expensive. It converts glucose to a mixture of about 42 percent fructose and 50-52 percent glucose with some other sugars mixed in. While alpha-amylase and glucoamylase are added directly to the slurry, pricey glucose-isomerase is packed into columns and the sugar mixture is then passed over it. Inexpensive alpha-amylase and glucoamylase are used only once, glucose-isomerase is reused until it loses most of its activity.

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Profound

There are two more steps involved. First is a liquid chromatography step that takes the mixture to 90 percent fructose. Finally, this is back-blended with the original mixture to yield a final concentration of about 55 percent fructose–what the industry calls high fructose corn syrup.

HFCS has the exact same sweetness and taste as an equal amount of sucrose from cane or beet sugar but it is obviously much more complicated to make, involving vats of murky fermenting liquid, fungus and chemical tweaking, all of which take place in one of 16 chemical plants located in the Corn Belt. Yet in spite of all the special enzymes required, HFCS is actually cheaper than sugar. It is also very easy to transport–it’s just piped into tanker trucks. This translates into lower costs and higher profits for food producers.

The development of the HFCS process came at an opportune time for corn growers. Refinements of the partial hydrogenation process had made it possible to get better shortenings and margarines out of soybeans than corn. HFCS took up the slack as demand for corn oil margarine declined. Lysine, an amino acid, can be produced from the corn residue after the glucose is removed. This is the modus operandi of the food conglomerates–break down commodities into their basic components and then put them back together again as processed food.

Today HFCS is used to sweeten jams, condiments like ketchup, and soft drinks. It is also a favorite ingredient in many so-called health foods. Four companies control 85 percent of the $2.6 billion business–Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Staley Manufacturing Co. and CPC International. In the mid-1990s, ADM was the object of an FBI probe into price fixing of three products–HFCS, citric acid and lysine–and consumers got a glimpse of the murky world of corporate manipulation.

There’s a couple of other murky things that consumers should know about HFCS. According to a food technology expert, two of the enzymes used, alpha-amylase and glucose-isomerase, are genetically modified to make them more stable. Enzymes are actually very large proteins and through genetic modification specific amino acids in the enzymes are changed or replaced so the enzyme’s “backbone” won’t break down or unfold. This allows the industry to get the enzymes to higher temperatures before they become unstable.

Consumers trying to avoid genetically modified foods should avoid HFCS. It is almost certainly made from genetically modified corn and then it is processed with genetically modified enzymes. I’ve seen some estimates claiming that virtually everything–almost 80 percent–of what we eat today has been genetically modified at some point. Since the use of HFCS is so prevalent in processed foods, those figures may be right.

But there’s another reason to avoid HFCS. Consumers may think that because it contains fructose–which they associate with fruit, which is a natural food–that it is healthier than sugar. A team of investigators at the USDA, led by Dr. Meira Field, has discovered that this just ain’t so.

Sucrose is composed of glucose and fructose. When sugar is given to rats in high amounts, the rats develop multiple health problems, especially when the rats were deficient in certain nutrients, such as copper. The researchers wanted to know whether it was the fructose or the glucose moiety that was causing the problems. So they repeated their studies with two groups of rats, one given high amounts of glucose and one given high amounts of fructose. The glucose group was unaffected but the fructose group had disastrous results. The male rats did not reach adulthood. They had anemia, high cholesterol and heart hypertrophy–that means that their hearts enlarged until they exploded. They also had delayed testicular development. Dr. Field explains that fructose in combination with copper deficiency in the growing animal interferes with collagen production. (Copper deficiency, by the way, is widespread in America.) In a nutshell, the little bodies of the rats just fell apart. The females were not so affected, but they were unable to produce live young.

“The medical profession thinks fructose is better for diabetics than sugar,” says Dr. Field, “but every cell in the body can metabolize glucose. However, all fructose must be metabolized in the liver. The livers of the rats on the high fructose diet looked like the livers of alcoholics, plugged with fat and cirrhotic.”

HFCS contains more fructose than sugar and this fructose is more immediately available because it is not bound up in sucrose. Since the effects of fructose are most severe in the growing organism, we need to think carefully about what kind of sweeteners we give to our children. Fruit juices should be strictly avoided–they are very high in fructose–but so should anything with HFCS.

Interestingly, although HFCS is used in many products aimed at children, it is not used in baby formula, even though it would probably save the manufactueres a few pennies for each can. Do the formula makers know something they aren’t telling us? Pretty murky!

About the author
Linda Forristal, CCP, MTA is the author of Ode to Sucanat (1993) and Bulgarian Rhapsody (1998). Visit her website at Mother Linda's.

There are almost always two sides to an argument, and certainly some individuals paint HFCS’s as a wonderful thing, cheaper than other sugars, superior to table sugar in giving baked goods a beautiful browned appearance, with a lower freezing point, and better texture in finished products like cookies and ice cream. Our plants probably don’t crave cookies and ice cream, but some will be tempted to use HFCS in their garden because it can be found easily and inexpensively in North America. That’s an issue we’ll try and revist as we continue to revise the 3LB’s Molasses Manual.

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Profound

Here’s another testimonial on the use of molasses in gardening, an excerpt from the book The Garden-Ville Method by Malcolm Beck.

Molasses - Sweet & Super

Molasses was one sweet treat we were never without when I was growing up. We put it on bread with butter for a snack. It was great on hot cornbread and really flavored up beans if stirred in the pot when they were very hot. My grandpa would eat molasses over cottage cheese every morning for breakfast, and he stayed healthy to his death at a very old age.

Back then I would never have guessed that molasses would have any value in growing plants or use in insect control. My friend who grows organic cotton up in the high plains uses molasses and a nitrogen-fixing microbe as his only fertilizer. (Nitrogen fixing means the nitrogen is made available to plants as nutrients.) I asked him what the molasses did, and he said it made the microbes work better.

I had to find out for myself, so I did a test. I used two containers of equal size with equal amounts of potting soil and the same number of rye grass seeds. One container was given only tap water; the other was given equal water with two tablespoons of molasses per gallon stirred in. After 8 weeks, the molasses watered plants were almost twice the size of the plants in the other container.

I was amazed, but I didn’t understand how molasses could make that much difference. We had the compost in the potting soil tested and found that it contained some of the same free-nitrogen-fixing microbes that the cotton grower used. (He used an Agri-Gro product containing the microbes.) One of these nitrogen-fixing microbes is Azotobacter, a microbe that can fix nitrogen straight from the air without living on the root of a legume as long as it has a source of energy such as sugar or molasses. Both are rich in carbohydrates, a good source of energy. In lab tests, Dr. Louis M. Thompson discovered that if given sugar weekly, the Azotobacter could fix from the air the equivalent of a thousand pounds of nitrogen per acre in ten weeks.

We recommend that molasses, 1 to 3 tablespoons, be added to each gallon of liquid fertilizer mix. It definitely makes a difference. It is also used as a binder in all of our dry fertilizer formulas.

Every gardener has his or her own favorite fertilizer recipe. Both Howard Garrett and John Dromgoole have popular recipes that contain molasses and other organic materials. You can experiment with your favorites and come up with your own best recipe.

I always foliar feed my fruit trees early each spring with fish emulsion and seaweed. Now I add molasses to the mix. The strangest thing I noticed when using molasses with the mix was that the fire ants would move out from under the trees. I also got reports from Houston that fire ants would move away from the lawns after an application of dry fertilizer that contained molasses.

I got an opportunity to see if molasses really moved fire ants. In my vineyard, I had a 500 foot row of root stock vines cut back to a stump that needed grafting. The fire ants had made themselves at home along that row because of the drip pipe that kept the soil soft and gave them a good supply of water. The mounds averaged three feet apart. There was no way a person could work there without being eaten alive!

I dissolved 4 tablespoons of molasses in each gallon of water and sprayed along the drip pipe. By the next day, the fire ants had moved out four feet in each direction. We were able to graft the vines without a single ant bothering us. With this success at moving the ants, I decided to spray the whole orchard and get rid of those pests. I learned, however, if the ants have no convenient place to move, they just stay where they are. I began wondering if the energy-rich molasses stimulate a soil microbe that the ants don’t like. This was the beginning of development of Garden-Ville Fire Ant Control.

A friend of mine up in dairy country uses a hydro cyclone to separate the liquids from the solids in cow manure. He noticed when spraying the liquids on hay fields that the fire ants tended to disappear. Tests of our compost have shown it to contain insect pathogens. The manure liquids and the compost tea both had some results as ant killers. The two together worked a little better. We knew that dormant oil sprays killed some insects, and that citrus peel extracts were used to kill insects, so we decided to mix orange oil with molasses and liquid cow manure. After months of research, we finally found the correct blend that not only killed ants, but any insects. It even smelled okay and would not burn the leaves of plants. It quickly degraded into a good energy-rich soil conditioner.

Needless to say, we offered our product to the market as Garden-Ville Fire Ant Control. We have many happy customers. You can even make your own if you don’t want to buy ours. More information is included in the article on fire ant control.

The Garden-Ville Method - Lessons in Nature

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Profound

In a blow against fertilizer empire giants hell bent on world domination that might have been better titled, Sweet Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope, the 3LB’s first posted our Molasses Manual at Overgrow and Cannabis World close to five years ago. Since then it’s been reposted and regurgitated at dozens of websites across the world wide web. In our eyes, this was a significant victory for our small rebel alliance of educated organic growers in the battle against corporate domination in the world of Horticulture.


We’ve all known the ag giant empire would attempt to discredit our efforts to teach growers. Just because a fertilizer or additive is advertised as some kind of special “magic bullet” for growers, it doesn’t mean there aren’t effective alternatives available at the supermarket or feed store, but please don’t remind the executives at Advanced Nutrients we are teaching that as gospel, it upsets two things. Their ulcers and their bottom line.

The have let the 3lb’s know in no uncertain terms that they don’t like us telling growers that most, if not all, “carboload” products marketed to growers are really just an overpriced and overhyped repackaging of molasses. And now, in the AN forum at PlanetGanja, they’ve resorted to obvious attempts to mislead growers as a part of their effort to reap ever greater profits and market share for their “magic bullet” carboload product.

Here’s the question that was asked of “Advanced” - the European distributor of AN’s product line:

is carboload black trap molases? whats it consist of? i had a bottle way back and found it very sugar beet like. great stuff,but i found regular molasses to work similar.

thanx in advanced.

Despite the spelling and grammar errors, it would seem to be a legitimate question.

Here’s the reply from “Advanced”:

Carboload contains 5 simple and complex carbohydrates in the ratios that our favourite plants utilize. The ingredients are:

Arabinose
Dextrose
Glucose
Maltose
Xylose

Black strap molasses or black treacle is made from a blend of cane sugars.

Almost any form of sugar would be a good additive but according to the R&D scientists at Advanced, the Carboload ingredients and ratios worked better.

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