clorox or purex

I have recently been hearing a lot about clorox or purex used in the garden.
1 what use is it?
2 what will it do to my soil?
3 what long term effect will it have on my plants?
Thank you roger Poor
poorboy@alltel.net

Aren't those brand names of bleach?

How are they telling you to use them in the garden??

I don't know if they make bleach or not, but Purex is a line of laundry detergents for sure. I sure stock enough of it each night I work! LOL

It will at least make the soil salty; since Sodium Hypochlorite is broken down into oxygen and table salt. It is valuable for disinfecting pots and greenhouses, but I can't see how it can benefit plants.

I have used bleach (SPARINGLY) when I've soaked tuberous roots that are a bit "furry" (dry mold). But when I say sparingly, I mean a teaspoon or two, to a couple gallons of water. I can't say for sure it helps the plants, but it makes me feel a bit better to think I might kill a little of the "nastiness" before I put them in the ground.

When I lived in the Bay area I used "gray water" from the laundry to water my plants. I often used bleach in the wash and the plants did not seem to mind it a bit. In fact some of the happiest plants I had grew where the hose leaked the gray water constantly. and the roses had a lot less black spot on them then too....but that was probably due ro the difference in climate from where I am now and not the bleach.

I've heard that it's good to toss sugar onto the lawn after watering to neutralize the damage from all the chlorine in city water systems

Once when I was trading for some iris rhizomes from a Master Gardener, before I realized that she really wasn't supposed to send such material from her area to mine, she included in the package the information that she had some type of troublesome maggot, destined to become a destructive moth, in her area, but had soaked the rhizomes overnight in a 10% bleach solution, as her MG learning directed, and hoped there would be no problems. I became ill before I could plant the rhizomes, and they stayed closed up in the box, which was in a plastic bag with a twistee on the top. Later, when I began to inventory my losses, I opened the bag and box, and there among the rhizomes were several hard brown immature forms of an insect. The rhizomes were rather mushy in spots, dried out in others. I destroyed them, as it was too obvious the bleach wasn't effective.

My washer is connected to a pipe which drains onto the soil under a large old oak tree. That tree is the healthiest oak in the area, where others have been wiped out by oak wilt. Other plants love growing there. And I use quite a lot of bleach in laundry and dishwashing at times.

Clorox and Purex were bleach brands long before they were laundry soap and other household products. I believe they began as rivals, but might have both been bought by one of those large conglomerates such as General Mills. Bleach has evolved along with the rest of the market, and the bleach currently on the shelves probably bears little resemblance to the original formula. An acid, it's still potentially dangerous, but is approved by many municipalities for water treatment. On the old label, possibly still there today, were instructions for making drinking water safe, sanitizing household surfaces, "sterilizing" utensils and "removing" harmful bacteria from dishwashing water, with the product. In our restaurant in Louisiana, we were required by state health laws to add a teaspoon of bleach per gallon to the water used for washing dishes and wiping tables.

Our local water system has changed from chlorine bleach to something different, because the chlorine bleach breaks down and becomes ineffective after approximately 24 hours exposure to the air. One of the books which came with an acquarium I bought some time ago informed me that I should run tap water and allow it to sit uncovered at least a day before it was added to the tank, to allow the chlorine to dissipate.

When I worked at J&P, they told us to advise people to soak the roots of their bare-root roses in a few gallons of water with a tablespoon or so of bleach added to it. It hydrated the roots, plus killed any fungus that might have been on the roots.

Aimee - sounds like those rhizomes had iris borers. Nasty critters. Did they look like these? http://images.google.com/images?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=iris+borers

GW, they were brown critters, with what appeared to be hard coverings that looked like an immature wasp all folded up, and were a little more than an inch long. In the box was at least one moth with "dust" and debris around it which wasn't there when I sealed it up, and there were about four of the brown things. I have seen things similar to the brown things since then, even dug some up in the past, but there were no holes in either the bag or the box so I don't think they originated here. It's not an uncommon looking form. It hasn't been found in my iris, in either stage, and the forms I dug up were in areas not in cultivation at the time.

Aimee, that reminds me, my parents always put cloroz into our water in Turkey. I think they were overly cautious, cause we drank the water all over the place that wasnt treated in this manner. and nothing ever happend to us. I think since we were born and raised there, we had antibodies for all the nasties out there..