You mean a university test? That seems like an awful lot of boron. I sometimes add a small amount when doing a general fertilization of orchards, but my research suggested spreading it like fairy dust- but in 30 years of managing many orchards here I’ve never witnessed a deficiency, even in the first year I come to an orchard and haven’t yet fertilized it.
Just be sure you have it right because it’s a lot easier to incorporate than remove!
UT ag extension report. Seems reasonable as borax is 1/9 or 11%boron. Other sources said 1/2 oz for new trees up to 3.5 oz for full trees every 3 years. I haven’t done borax ever and put it out there at 2oz per tree. The 65 oz box did the whole 1/2 acre orchard
I didn’t realize Borax was that dilute.
Delivered boron via spray in my case they get it faster and it takes less. Pears had blossom blast and i needed fast boron to stop it from progressing. Completely wiped it out but not instantly as they say it just progresses no further. It takes awhile to see full recovery but i felt i was right within 2 hours of spraying. https://agriculture.borax.com/blog/july-2017/need-a-quick-acting-boron-supplement-spray-it!
At least one person is talking about weed control here, but for fertilizing, I see a 1 tablespoon on borax per 100 square feet recommendation online, which seems a little more than my uncle’s (a nursery man) recommendation of 2-3 Tablespoons in 2 gallons of water per full size mature tree sprayed under the whole canopy to make sure there are no burn points from a high concentration.
In my above posts, I mentioned on a 150 sq.ft. plot .1 pounds or 1.6 oz. of 20 mule Borax. That part is going to be pretty close to raise the average soil about 1 ppm.
Then I mentioned 5 teaspoons = 1.6 ounces. I miss calculated that part. I was was at the orchard at the time, on my phone, and just screwed up the conversion from weight to volume measurement.
From the SDS, 20 Mule Borax has a density of 48 lbs/cubic ft, which equals about .77grams/ml. Water is 1 gram/ml. So Borax is 77% the density of water. Alternatively one would have to add about 30% more Borax by volume to equal the same weight of water. So for 150 sq.ft plot, about 4 tablespoons of 20 mule borax would give about about 1.6 ounces of Borax by weight.
Apologies for anyone who under applied the Borax based upon my calculations. I went back and edited my original post where I erroneously converted weight to volume of 1.6 ounces = 5 teaspoons. I just removed that part. The actual weight of 0.1 lbs or 1.6 ounces of Borax per 150 sq. ft. is correct.
For a 100 sq.ft plot, one could simply take 2/3rds of the above calculation, which would equal 2.68 table spoons, or 2 tablespoons along with 2 teaspoons.
My compost tested Boron-free.
I use ant poison, Boric acid, to bring it up to speed. About 50% Boron.
Even though I start at zero it doesn’t take much to bring it up to speed, as Olpea suggests.
I would start by reading this thread Boron deficiency / Blossom Blast?. The only ingredient in the laundry detergent is sodium tetraborate https://www.20muleteamlaundry.com/
"Borax is a powdery white substance, also known as sodium borate, sodium tetraborate, or disodium tetraborate. It’s widely used as a household cleaner and a booster for laundry detergent. It’s a combination of boron, sodium, and oxygen.
Borax is often found in dry lake beds in places like California’s Death Valley, where the water evaporated and left behind deposits of minerals.
Boric acid is made from the same chemical compound as borax and even looks like it. But while borax is commonly used in cleaning, boric acid is mainly used as a pesticide. Boric acid kills insects by targeting their stomachs and nervous systems
Both borax and boric acid in loose powder form can be harmful if swallowed, particularly for children. They can also irritate your skin.
The best-known use for borax is as a cleaner, but you can find the ingredient in many other household products, including:
Borax is also an ingredient for making putty-like “slime” for kids.
Scientists have been studying whether the compounds in borax might help your body fight conditions like arthritis or osteoporosis, but more research is needed to know if or how they might work.
Borax health risks
Borax can cause nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea if you ingest it by itself, and large amounts can lead to shock and kidney failure. It’s banned in U.S. food products. It also can irritate your skin and eyes, and it can hurt your nose, throat, and lungs if you breathe it in. If you’re around it often, it can cause rashes and might affect male reproductive organs.
Warning
Overexposure to borax can cause the following symptoms:
If you’re going to use borax at home, there are precautions you can take to make sure you do so safely:
If your boric acid is sold as poison, don’t use it! It could be full of contaminates at the very least!
Borax is cheap safe and even used to cure human diseases.
But nobody mentioned its other great use. In the old days we used borax to cure our salmon roe for river fishing. It’s another one of those great old time every day products that’s almost vanished from common usage. I keep both borax and super washing soda in the house for cleaning and other purposes.
My comment was about someone using boric acid sold as a poison, while pure boric acid would probably be quite good to use fertilizing, anything sold as a poison could be full of lead, arsenic, cadmium, and all kinds of toxic chemical byproducts which you don’t want in your soil, but to be fair, they’re probably insignificant, but I would definitely not recommend buying it especially when borax is so cheap.
Definitely want to know what is in it, like you said. I dont disagree with you. Frequently, even fertilizers can cause problems with excessive salts, excessive micro or macro nutrients, unavailable minerals, or imbalanced nutrients. Cations and anions in the soil work with plants in a complex relationship. Bacteria and fungi play a large part in the uptake of nutrients certain plants use. Nitrogen fixing trees, bushes, and legumes pull nitrogen from the air for the plants to use as nutrients. Clay is notorious for being deficient in boron. Clay is highly nutrient dense but those nutrients are locked up.
Why though?
Once we get out of the realm of food grade materials anything is possible. If anything I think that something sold as indoor-use insecticide would be a little more accurate assay than the random industrial chemicals I also put on my plants such as Copper Sulfate or, for that matter Borax.
I find many times industrial grade can be more pure than did grade, chemical grade almost certainly is more pure for controlled reactions, bit check the analysis, it’s usually relatively honest and household and food grade are the most motivated to cheat, no consumer testing.