Talk:Soil conditioner

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This subject is within the scope of Soil WikiProject, which collaborates on Soil and related articles on Wikipedia. To participate, help improve these articles or visit the project page for details on the project.
Stub	This article has been rated as Stub-Class on the quality scale.
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the importance scale.
Article Grading: The article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.

[edit] Merge

Is there a difference between a soil amendment and a soil conditioner, and is it a big enough difference to justify separate articles? -- Kjkolb 13:32, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I added merge tags. The merge direction is not set, I just chose one so that the discussion link would come to one place. -- Kjkolb 02:23, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

I would argue that soil amendments and conditioners are the same thing. They are both applied to improve soil fertility. While fertilizers provide nutrients for plants, both amendments and conditioners improve other chemical, physical or biological components of the soil's fertility.203.153.228.8 06:38, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Regarding the binding of water to clay molecules: If I recall correctly, clay molecule acquire a negative charge and form hydrogen bonds to the positive end of a water dipole. This is purely electrostatic and has nothing to do with magnetism. I am not quite enough of an expert to be comfortable doing this edit but would imagine that it is more correct to say something like: "...clay may hold more water but the clay molecules carry a negative electric charge and therefore form hydrogen bonds with the water molecules. These bonds are difficult for roots to break." Peter Chastain 22:09, 7 October 2006 (UTC)