I am a beginner, and my trees are all pretty small. I read about the concept of keeping a little moat of pea stone mulch around the trunk of each tree, even if there are other plants further out, and liked the idea. Started with gravel, but at work we sometimes scrap chunk silicon feedstock that has been used for machine development or otherwise rendered unfit for production use. I thought it would be cool to mulch my trees with 99.99999% pure solar grade silicon. Here it is around some new apricot trees we planted this spring.
I don’t expect anything from it that I wouldn’t get by putting gravel down, but it does kind of draw the eye and is an oddball item to mention during a garden tour
As Levers alludes, I don’t know how bioavailable that form of silicon would be, but generally some silicon is beneficial to plants. Some plants (like tomatoes) could be at risk of getting too much silicon because it can compete with other nutrients.
I like the idea of your mulch. We have problems here of young trees wanting to “wallow out” because of wet soil and high winds. The trees will wallow out if not staked. Then they will slowly break off or damage roots from all the movement which will eventually kill the tree.
I don’t have time to stake trees, so when the trees wallow out (almost all of ours do) I put sand in the hole to firm the tree up. Sand works OK, and firms the trees up enough to keep them from wallowing too much. However, I’ve read that chat is a preferred material for this purpose (not actual lead type chat, but chat sized gravel). I suspect your silicon would perform the same function as chat.
