Boron deficiency- may be a cause for as yet unsolved cultivation problems

[partisangardener]

Be careful with the dosage. Too much can kill plants and they are all different. Lilies and Cyclamen seem to love it. I could not jet provoke with my spraying regime ill effects, but a friend found out that it can be used to kill plants.

So don't do it every watering or so. Some plant species  show with only 2 ppm boron in the water they grow with bad growth and can be killed if getting more.
My spraying will be stopped for this year because I did a lot . It is still very positive on most plants.
Only new planted specimens will get one spraying because the effect is too good.

[Alan_b]

This supplier web site (http://mistralni.co.uk/products/borax-sodium-tetraborate-decahydrate ) says:

Please Note: This product has been reclassified by the ECHA as Reprotoxic Category 2 and as such is not available to the general public. Borax can only be purchased by Professionals and by trade and business users or for scientific research.

So it seems I don't have the option of using borax as a boron source.

[brianw]

Ireland's ebay will send you some; from Stoke-on-Trent ;-) Not checked Germany or France etc.

[Jupiter]

This thread is ironic to me considering we are fighting boron toxicity here in South Australia during the summer months. At work where I grow plants for experimental purposes we have had some catastrophic failures of whole experiments due to boron. Our mains water here gets more salty over summer when supplies are low, and boron in conjunction with sodium is a lethal mix. Our government has built a desal (reverse osmosis sea water desalination) plant which feeds into the mains supply and boron is in very high concentrations in desalinated water. I'm told the process doesn't remove boron very efficiently. Oh the joys of living in the driest state on the driest continent on the planet. All my strawberries died last summer; classic symptoms of boron toxicity evident. With the bulbs it isn't such an issue because most are dormant during the hotter months.

[partisangardener]

Some lime might have been the solution for your strawberries. Mine have recovered from my overdose and look now better than ever, but I did it with water, which here is almost without Boron at all.  Boron is as toxic as ordinary salt for mammals speak us.
But for insects its very toxic.

There are areas in Australia (Perth) which have low amount of Boron, as the story of the medical use of Borax implies.
http://www.health-science-spirit.com/borax.htm
But there is mining of Boron in Australia too. So it depends where you live there.

[partisangardener]

The new year has started and my Boron experiment goes on.

Galanthus which had some Boron last spring, flowered much better this year. Even G. woronowii flowered this year with bigger flowers and of course most of them flowered this year. This never happened here with me. Even in my old garden this species had rarely flowers. All other species grew like mad there.
I garden now on very poor Galanthus soil.

After a normal winter like this one with frost up to -20 C° Cyclamen leafs tend to be a bit worn. Not with Boron. They got two applications in autumn. Did not look that bad in spring.
They got two other applications in spring and started to grow bigger. The stems lift the leafs above the ground now again.