Yes you heard that right plants prefer ammonia over anything else.

Yes you heard that right plants prefer ammonia over anything else. Okay I'm going to explain to you just how it works. If you give a plant nitrogen it has to in a two step process convert nitrogen into nitrites and then back into ammonia. It takes energy to convert nitrogen back into ammonia therefore a plant can only do this during peak photosynthesis.

What this means if you put a nitrogen fertilizer tablet inside of a plant basket it can only be utilized during the day. At night when the plant is at rest the nitrogen can leach back into solution. The worst part of this whole scenario is people have been told that plants need nitrogen. Yes the plants will grow big and beautiful with that nitrogen tablet inside the plant basket. But the plant itself is doing very little work to clean your pond or do anything that will benefit the pond. However, if you let a plant take in ammonia only it will then grow what they call fine root hairs and these fine root hairs will take more and more ammonia. Only when ammonia is just about exhausted will the plant then go after nitrogen as a food source.

A biocenosis basket provides the right environment for all aquatic plants. Terrestrial plants are a little different in the way they process ammonia nitrogen. Aquatic plants on the other hand will take "Cation's and "Anion's in equilibrium with each other.

(Cation - A positively charged ion, with less electrons than protons. Anion - A negatively charged ion, with more electrons than protons.) As you can see giving a plant what it wants,it will then do a lot more work for you than just flower. The biocenosis baskets provides the correct environment to attract ammonia out of the water body so the plant root hairs can utilize it. Without the correct environment no easy uptake of ammonia by the plant.

And we haven't even touched on the science of what the bacteria does inside the baskets.