Nature’s Nitrogen

Free Food for Your Garden

By Virginia Hayes

Suppose you never had to fertilize your garden again? Suppose
all you had to do was include a few special plants in your garden
design to produce all the nutrients your garden needed? Sound too
good to be true? It’s not. Farmers all over the world, from India
to Mexico to Hawai‘i, have been doing just that for ages. In fact,
not only have these farmers been feeding their plant crops, they
are supplementing the diet of their livestock, creating living
fences and windbreaks, even feeding their families from the fruits
of these amazing plants. What’s the trick? It’s called
nitrogen-fixing and there are a slew of plant species that do
it.

Nitrogen is a “colorless, odorless, tasteless, insoluble, inert
diatomic gas comprising 78 percent of the atmosphere by volume.” It
is also a constituent of numerous biologically important compounds,
such as proteins, DNA, and RNA, to name a few. As such, it is one
of the most important plant nutrients, an element that plants
cannot survive without. Plants themselves are unable to take
nitrogen directly from the air; it must be combined with other
elements to form compounds that can be absorbed through the roots
of the plant.