Use crystal energy to super-grow your plants

Try this crystal energy science experiment with David Hamilton

Many amateur gardeners swear that crystals can make plants grow faster. If this is true, it may be due to a property of quartz known as diamagnetism.

Know the science

Just as an umbrella deflects the path of rain, essentially pouring it onto anything around it, diamagnetic materials deflect the Earth’s magnetic field. The effect is that more of the Earth’s magnetic field concentrates on whatever is close to the material. Quartz is diamagnetic.

The Earth’s magnetic field – the GMF (geomagnetic field) – plays an important role in plant growth. The study is known as plant magnetoreception and has become popular due to scientists wishing to understand how plants will grow in space or even one day on Mars, where they are subject to different magnetic fields.

Scientists have found that experimentally increasing or decreasing the magnetic field felt by a plant alters its growth rate. Some species grow faster in a higher field strength and slower when the field is weaker, and it’s the other way around for some other species. How a species responds seems to be related to its genes.

Power up your plants

Since quartz is diamagnetic, the presence of quartz crystals close to a plant may increase the strength of the GMF felt by the plant. The effect might be small, but it may explain why some gardeners are convinced that crystals can be a powerful aid to plant growth.

I did a small study myself to test the effect. I poured water into a plastic cup and taped some small splinters of rose quartz to the underside of the cup (I wanted to make sure that any effects were not due to any impurities in the quartz that could dissolve in the water) and used this to water a few hundred cress seeds each day for a week. I compared the growth rate with the same number of seeds watered with ordinary water.

Surprising even to myself, after a week the sprouts from the seeds watered with the ‘rose quartz elixir’ had grown about 30% longer than those watered with the ordinary water.

Now try something new

Use crystals on your plants

Try the following experiment. It’s fun for all the family. There are two ways to do it so some family members can choose one way and some the other, and you can compare notes at the end.

The experiment is to compare:
a crystals in growing medium (or soil)
b crystals in the water used to water seeds, with c seeds without any influence of crystals (the control/comparison condition). Depending on how you do your experiment, you may be using something simple like tissue paper as your growing base, or even soil. If you tend to sprout seeds for salads, then use your usual set up.

1 Choose seeds that you sprout, like any of the popular varieties that people sprout for their salads.

2 For those placing the crystal in the growing medium, place a crystal as close as possible to the seeds. In the middle of them would be ideal. If you’re using a crystal with a point, align it in a north-south direction (the direction the geomagnetic field lines run in). Water them each day with ordinary water.

3 If you’re making an elixir, let the crystal sit in some water for an hour or so and then use it to water your sprouts. You can add a little of the water each day as your sprouts grow, using the same elixir throughout.

4 Let the sprouts grow for a week and then compare the lengths of the sprouts grown in contact with a crystal (a) against those watered with a crystal elixir (b) with those grown without any crystal influence. You may be able to see a visible difference, or you may need to do it the long way and measure the lengths of sprouts by hand. Notice which condition created the longer sprouts.

5 If you wish to do a longer-term experiment, plant some quartz crystals in the soil as close as possible to a plant in your garden or greenhouse.

Dr David Hamilton is a Scottish author with a PhD in organic chemistry, who tours the UK giving speeches on the mind-body connection.