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Foliar Feeding is a relatively new, technique of feeding plants by applying liquid fertiliser directly to their leaves. In some cases, a dramatic example being tomatoes, this goes against long-standing strictures against ever allowing the leaves to get wet. While the conventional wisdom is "don't even spray your tomato plants, only water them by soaking the ground beneath", modern gardening techniques strongly recommend spraying the leaves of a tomato plant with fertiliser, as part of the normal fertilisation routine.

Foliar feeding is considered especially useful for introducing trace elements, or for "emergency" feeding of plants which are found to have a specific shortage. But in some cases, as with the example tomatoes, it's actually believed that foliar feeding during flower set actually causes a dramatic increase in fruit production.

Generally speaking, it is recommended that foliar feeding be done in morning or evening, since hot days cause the pores on some plants' leaves to close.

Foliar feeding is also finding an unusual niche: organic gardening. Gardeners who, in their effort to "feed the soil", keeping it naturally healthy, often find themselves unable to provide some trace nutrients in sufficient quantity. Foliar feeding may allow them to add those nutrients directly, without disrupting soil development. A popular version of this is to use sea-based nutrient mixes, especially algae, because it contains many of the fifty "trace nutrients"; the more "trace" the need, the harder to balance the element within the soil. Coincidentally, trace elements are considered most fit for delivery by foliar feeding. Algae also contains some hormones considered good for the cellular development of the plants' leaves, flowers, and fruit, again making foliar feeding useful to organic gardeners who eschew artificial hormone applications.

One way to tell if a fertilizer has been affective is to squeeze juice from the leaves of plant and to test it with a refractometer. If after spraying with foliar fertilizer the amount of light refracted significantly rises, then foliar application has worked. To increase effectiveness it is recommended to use a spray enhancer to help the nutrients to stick to the leaf and to penetrate the waxy sheen of the leaf such as "spray Pal".[Agriculture Solutions "spray Pal"]

• Fertilizer
• Organic gardening

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