Here's a nitrogen cycle diagram. It's not dissimilar to things like the water cycle or food chain cycle.
Show
Practically speaking, you want to occasionally plant nitrogen fixing plants in your garden, as other plants will remove it from the soil. Lots of people will put tons of fertilizer into their garden, and that seeks to achieve similar goals.
Some plants slurp nitrogen out of the air. This is inefficient since atmospheric nitrogen is M2, which is quite stable and happy to stay that way. Takes a lot of energy to break that bond.
Other plants create microbial biomes in their root systems that fix nitrogen for them in forms that are easier to absorb, like ammonium and nitrate, which are much cheaper to use. The plant gets bioavailable nitrogen for cheap, the soil gets leftover fixed nitrogen, and the bacteria get a home. In a healthy ecosystem other plants can crib off the leftover nitrogen and provide benefits of their own, like fixing topsoil or creating biomes for fungi to recycle dead matter back into useful nutrients.
The sky is full of nitrogen, some of them can grab it from there and others take it from the ground. I'm not a plant scientist, so I don't really know all the details
okay but non-joke question: what the hell is a nitrogen cycle and how does it work in practice like in your garden
Here's a nitrogen cycle diagram. It's not dissimilar to things like the water cycle or food chain cycle.
Practically speaking, you want to occasionally plant nitrogen fixing plants in your garden, as other plants will remove it from the soil. Lots of people will put tons of fertilizer into their garden, and that seeks to achieve similar goals.
Some plants slurp nitrogen out of the air. This is inefficient since atmospheric nitrogen is M2, which is quite stable and happy to stay that way. Takes a lot of energy to break that bond.
Other plants create microbial biomes in their root systems that fix nitrogen for them in forms that are easier to absorb, like ammonium and nitrate, which are much cheaper to use. The plant gets bioavailable nitrogen for cheap, the soil gets leftover fixed nitrogen, and the bacteria get a home. In a healthy ecosystem other plants can crib off the leftover nitrogen and provide benefits of their own, like fixing topsoil or creating biomes for fungi to recycle dead matter back into useful nutrients.
The sky is full of nitrogen, some of them can grab it from there and others take it from the ground. I'm not a plant scientist, so I don't really know all the details
The pea family is notorious for this, this is part of why I throw clover all over anytime I turn dirt in the yard
Symbiosis with nitrogen fixing bacteria.
Paradoxically, you must break nitrogen to fix nitrogen.