Tom: Calcium chloride.

At this stage, I’m not chelating anything. I’ve been creating calcium acetate (WCA) but I’ve stumbled upon a company producing a product called Grow-Cal for which they use “non synthetic calcium chloride” as their source to produce their soil and foliar product.

My interest is two fold:

1) amino acid chelation interests me, I’m aware glycine is used in the conventional space and I’m curious how this process works and why it is used.

2) why is this company creating a product that uses something more complex than WCA?

This comes from the cannabis space, so bro science abounds but here is the bio from their product:

“We’ve been searching long and hard for a calcium25 replacement. The wait is finally over! Grow-Cal is derived from non-synthetic calcium chloride and is amino acid chelated with no EDTA chelators used at all. This means it is safe for microbes. We believe multiple sources of calcium create the best results when considering immediate and long term needs. Grow-Cal can be used not only as a foliar but also as a drench and we’ve seen great results doing both.”

Calcium-25 is a product that contains “nautral plant wax components…together with calcium” and seems to be somewhat pseudo sciencey because my understanding (Jeff Lowenfels) is that calcium is not very mobile and so foliar applications are limited in what they can achieve. Cal25 claims the foliar application sees calcim “translocated throughout the plant rapidly” which contradicts what I’ve read. I am aware that plants that grow rapdily can struggle to get enough calcium out of the soil hence the natural farming application of WCA to address things like blossom end rot, so I’m trying to get to the root of why someone would amino acid chelate over just using something simple like WCA.