Reasons Your Plants are Turning Yellow + How to Fix It

what is going on everyone welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the my gardener channel in today's episode we're going to be talking about reasons why your plants might be turning yellow there's a whole ton of reasons why and so i wanted to break them down because a lot of you have been writing in asking about yellow seedlings yellow plants and reasons why that might be happening so i wanted to talk about it because it can definitely become a serious issue if it's not addressed but it also on the flip side might just be a very temporary problem so let's talk about it i'm very excited to talk about this uh this topic and so let's jump on into it the first reason why your plants might be turning yellow is just because they're freshly transplanted we've had a lot of people that are just putting their plants in the ground and then they write to us saying luke i just planted my plants that started out beautiful in green prime example it actually happened to us beautiful spinach we got this stuff from our local greenhouse just the most incredibly green gorgeous spinach we moved it into our beds and they started to turn a little bit yellow and what we found is that after they sat in the soil for a week or two and they got accustomed to the soil they turned green again and that's just because of something that we call transplant shock when you move a plant from a you know a container or a little cell pack and you actually move it into the into the soil that it's going to be growing in permanently that that shock can happen from a change in ph it can happen in a change of soil texture it can happen from soil moisture soil temperature there's a lot of different factors that can cause some stress and that stress can basically set the plant back and it basically shuts down the ability for the plant to uptake nutrients it goes in kind of survival mode and that survival mode can be seen by the yellowing of leaves and over time once it gets accustomed to that soil the ph the nutrients the you know just the texture of it temperature of it how wet it is how dry it is things like that even how much sun there is that can really help to uh to just kind of heal those issues and you'll find that it bounces back pretty quickly so transplant shock i find is one of the most common reasons why your plants are turning yellow just shortly after transplanting the second reason why your plants might be turning yellow and let's say these are established plants let's see these plants are already in the ground they've already been in the ground for quite some time like a perennial might be a fruit tree it might be a perennial herb and your plants are turning yellow that's not as much transplant shock that can be uh that can actually be a nutrient deficiency and the nutrient that we want to look at most commonly for yellowing of leaves is nitrogen often in the springtime when we get a lot of rain like we're having right now it's actually raining right now so hopefully it doesn't rain too hard but a lot of times in the early spring when we get a lot of rain rain has a tendency to flush nitrogen through the soil in a process called leaching when you have nitrogen nitrogen is water soluble and water soluble means that it absorbs in water and uh and when water runs through the soil or runs away from the soil it can carry away nitrogen with it and so often times if you're not fertilizing in the spring we always recommend fertilizing with a good nitrogen rich fertilizer that could be blood meal that could be your your nitrogen source of choice like a fish emulsion or a compost tea worm castings there's lots of things that have nitrogen in them but we want to make a practice of of giving back to the soil in the springtime because that can cause some yellow some yellow leaves on existing plants now i want to talk about some reasons why your plants might be turning yellow uh you know let's say they they looked great you planted them they didn't turn yellow right away these are new transplants we're talking about let's say it's been three or four weeks after you transplanted and they're slowly going downhill that could be for a couple reasons one we want to look at the composition of the soil is the soil very sandy if water can move through the soil very quickly and our soil is very sandy nitrogen leaves the soil much quicker and so you'll find that there's a possibility that after three to five weeks a lot of that nitrogen that was in the soil that the plants were using for for nutrients they were nice and green when you planted them and they were growing and then they got stunted in yellow it could be because that nitrogen flushed out of the soil very quickly the other reason is because the soil is too compacted now if your soil doesn't have a whole lot of sand but it has a lot of clay clay can hold on to moisture too much moisture like in springtime when it rains a lot if your soil is very heavy clay your plants can hap have something called a root rot and root rot happens when the soil does not dry out the roots they they don't have a chance to dry out and the bacteria found in the soil actually will eat the roots of your plants and because the the root mass is deteriorated the plants can't uptake the nitrogen in the soil and so therefore they end up kind of wilting and turning yellow and they show some signs of stress and that can be because there's too much clay in the soil the the other reason why your plants might be might be turning yellow is because of a different lack of nitrogen if you have soil that has a lot of broken unbroken down material our soil has a lot of this and i'll bring you guys in close so you can see what i'm talking about but our soil has a lot of this uh kind of mulchy material on top and that's because we had a uh this compost that was created from a lot of wood mulch but not all of it was broken down yet and so uh what happens is that if you if you take a lot of that unbroken down material this stuff here that's it's not composted and you dig that and bury that into the soil we used it as a mulch so we actually used it right on top and we did not dig it and incorporate it into the soil if we would have taken all of this all of this wood chip matter and incorporated it into our existing soil that we were planting it and really dug it around and mixed it around this not completely broken down material it actually goes through a process called nitrogen sequestration bacteria found in the soil use the nitrogen from the soil the nitrogen that your plants are using for food and they actually will use that nitrogen to assist in the breaking down of the carbon so this carbon material this is all carbon right here this stuff's not completely broken down in fact it's so not broken down that it's not even punky yet so if we were to mix that into the soil and we had too much uh you know organic matter that was not completely broken down yet too much carbon material found in the soil and and we mixed that in your plants even though they looked really great when you first planted them over time that nitrogen actually is used by the bacteria to break down that carbon source and over time over a couple years that that nitrogen is actually given back it'll actually be given back to the soil but very temporarily for a season or two your plants are really going to struggle okay so see this is our soil here this is actually a lot of unbroken down material it acts as a wonderful mulch layer but if we were to bury this into the soil this right here would not be good for soil health instead it's sitting on top of the soil so it's not interfering with any nutrients if you dig down and you dig down deeper you'll see a lot of the stuff is actually already broken down see that so this this stuff here that's not completely broken down yet this is acting as a mulch layer it's not incorporated in our soil and so therefore it's not sequestering nitrogen from our soil just wanted to give you guys a clear a clear example of that a way to fix all these issues is if your soil is too sandy you can add finished compost finished compost has a lot of humus that's going to allow the soil to actually hold on to nutrients like a sponge so the humus is the broken down organic matter it's completely broken down and so it's actually going to be like a sponge that's going to hold on to the nutrients where the plant roots are going to use it if your soil has too much clay you can amend that with yes some sand sand can work in some instances but we don't prefer that you use sand in clay soil because you can actually make concrete that's a great way to make your soil even harder so if your soil has you know some organic matter but there's a lot of clay you can get by with adding some sand but our preference is that you just add compost because compost again is going to break up and actually start to weather that clay it's going to allow the clay to break up so you're getting the benefits of the clay because clay has a lot of minerals it's very good for your soil but it's just all about moderation so compost helps to break up that clay so you get the mineral content from the clay but allowing the soil to drain allowing the soil to dry out and have some some aeration so that can fix clay soil and then likewise if you have not enough in or if you have too much inorganic material in your soil and it's causing your plants to turn yellow what i'd recommend doing is again just fertilizing with a really good nitrogen-rich fertilizer because the bacteria are using nitrogen found in your soil to break down the carbon common sense would say to just add a little bit more nitrogen and then what happens is it actually has a surplus of nitrogen in the soil yes some is being used to break down the inorganic material or the organic material not inorganic your the nitrogen is being used by the bacteria to break down the organic material that's in your soil but also there's some nitrogen left over for your plants to use and that's a really simple fix so just make sure you're aware of what those look like and then the very final reason why your plants might be turning yellow is simply because of their life their life cycle a lot of times we as gardeners we like to assume that our garden is going to stay alive forever and there's a lot of plants that as they reach the uh the end of their life the flowering cycle they start to turn yellow and that's because uh a plant when it starts to change its its uh you know its duties oftentimes a plant starts out well it always starts out growing but if you look at say a tomato a tomato plant focuses in the beginning on growth it focuses on leaf production but as those leaves grow into a fully mature plant it realizes very quickly that it can't just keep growing it needs to produce some fruit and so oftentimes what it does is it just shifts its priority and when it shifts its priority it oftentimes will take up less nitrogen and focus on more things like phosphorus and potassium and when it shifts its priorities sometimes you can have some yellowing of leaves and that's very common it's definitely not a bad thing you know oftentimes we find that in mid-summer when we have our heaviest tomato yields we also have some of our more yellow leaves not yellow yellow but our leaves start turning yellow and a lot of people right in just panicked and they end up adding a ton of nitrogen to their soil and it's counter it's actually counterproductive because the tomato doesn't need that nitrogen it's in its part of its life where it wants to focus on fruit production and fruit ripening not leaf production so just keep that in mind that that's something that's something that we need to look at is what the stage of the life span that it's in you know if our cilantro here is going to bolt if it's going to seed a lot of times more often than not the leaves will actually turn a little yellow because it's focusing on flowering it's focusing on seed production it's not focusing on growing the leaves anymore and so just you know keep that in mind as well that life's life cycle and lifespan has a lot to do with the color of the leaves as well so there you guys go i hope you guys enjoyed i hope you learned something new and as always this is luke from the my gardener channel reminding you to grow big or go home and we'll catch you all later see ya bye

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 583,508

Keywords: tips, nitrogen deficiency, stressed, soil, Premiere_Elements_2018, stunted growth, yellowing plants, seedlings, garden tip, clay soil, sandy soil, nitrogen, help, yellow leaves, root rot

Id: aRqT3mgoYjQ

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Sun May 17 2020