Quote:
Originally Posted by Inglewood Jack
I’m putting food down my gullet constantly, providing the materials for growth and regeneration of all my cells, including follicles. What’s the equivalent process for grass? I spread fertilizer every 6 weeks and a bit of topsoil in trouble spots at the start of the growing season, but that’s a tiny amount of material compared to what I’m removing by mowing and bagging.
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I guess just think about a tree in the forest - plants are amazing in they turn micro nutrients, sun, air, and water into giant masses. So if you end up with, say, 1 tonne of wood from the tree, it isn't as if 1 tonne or even 1/2 tonne of soil was "eaten up" to make the tree and now you have 1 tonne less dirt in the forest. The bulk of the tree is carbon based cells created from water and CO2, simply facilitated through those nutrients in the soil. I'm making up numbers, but I would expect that a tree would be, say, 1% micro nutrients from the soil, and 99% of the tree mass would be created from water and air. So in the forest example, assuming there are no additions of nutrients at all, the soil around it would have lost 1% of the trees mass in nutrients.
So in your case, you're replenishing the nutrients that are being used in growing the grass, plus your bagging is not 100% effective so there is mass re-added that way as well, but just like the trees, the bulk of the grass created is from the water and air, not soil.
Another example if its not "clicking" is hydroponics. There is no soil involved at all to "lose", yet giant amounts of plant matter is created from the same mix of water, air, light, and nutrients.