How much would you guess you put on the bed? If you can still see it in the morning I'd try to scoop it off the top as much as possible. I would think watering in the rest really well for the next few days would help.

Don't worry about making mistakes, it would take forever to share mine. I've learned from them though and I'm sure you won't salt your vegetables in the garden anymore :) You identified the problem though and that was good.

I agree with afishlady. It all depends on how much salt you used. If it's just a light sprinkling then you should water your beds well to leach out the salt. Most commercial fertilizers have salt in them and I've even seen recommendations to use epsom salts when watering peppers. So don't worry too much about it (unless you used a lot).

Rodney

sprinkling is nothing. you have to add whole salt packs to see something. use a rubber glove to pick them and dunk them in a quart of soapy water. in the morning, pour them somewhere where the robins can find them.

"Most commercial fertilizers have salt in them"

While this is true, it's generally not a sodium based salt...they're ammonium based. It's all about ion transfer when it comes to "salts" in fertilizers. Sodium is a lot more harsh on soils than ammonium...it can destabilize soil structure in high amounts as well as "clog" water uptake mechanisms and kill cells in plants a whole lot easier compared to ammonium salts. Sodium isn't toxic...plants need sodium...just not in high amounts.

That said, unless the OP drenched their soil in table salt, it's most likely nothing to worry about.

Judging by this..."Mostly they went directly on the slugs themselves but at times, my aim wasnt the best"...everything should be just fine. Some leaves might "burn" from salt injury if salt was left on the leaves, but that's a localized issue specific to areas applied (if it even happens) and it won't ruin the soil or the whole plant unless the direct applied damage is on great enough of a surface area.

This post was edited by nc-crn on Fri, Oct 4, 13 at 1:33

I don't think plant actually need sodium at all. The 16 micro and macro nutrients they do need don't include sodium. Sodium in soil will mostly like be taken up by plants in place of K, which is a far more preferable ion type for plant health, because sodium ion is somehow more soluble and movable than K if i'm not mistaken. Plants do not need sodium if the soil has enough K . Never replace K with sodium if given the choice.

Sodium isn't important to all plants, nor is it essential to any plant substance/chemical production, nor is it needed in anything but an extremely "micro" amount in all but a very few plants. It's mostly useful as physiological water relation + drought resistant "nutrient" to plants on whole for ionic transport.

Sugar beets respond very well to it and you'll see deficiency symptoms in soils too low in Na with thin/dark leaves with a dull sheen.

It's rather important in C4 plants, too.

That said, sodium is extremely low on the scale of nutrient need...and because it's not part of making any essential chemical compounds in the plant, it could be argued that it's nothing more than an ionic balance "nutrient"...but many plants need/desire the ionic balance in relation to water/cell movement that sodium provides (even discounting C4 plants).

Sodium is almost impossible to avoid...from rain water, to tap water, to mineral soils, to organic matter, etc...it's just not a large amount of it in most areas...thankfully.

Btw, sugar beet growers tend to grow sugar beets in already high sodium soils...not amend soil in order to grow sugar beets. These lands tend to be a bit cheap because of how few crops you can commercially grow in these areas to begin with. You're not going to find growers out there "salting the earth" in order to grow their crops...though there's some home gardeners that (unfortunately) salt their asparagus (which have a high sodium tolerance) patches as a herbicide measure.

Very few growers of anything but very specialized plants will amend with anything sodium based. It's just not needed as an amendment. There's enough sodium from natural parent soils and/or watering sources to provide almost every plant with all the sodium they'll ever need.

This post was edited by nc-crn on Fri, Oct 4, 13 at 3:32

Alright thanks everyone! I get that sodium isnt good for plants at all. Now to hope that mine didnt suffer any damage - i did only sprinkle on the slugs so that some did fall on the soil and i also sprinkled a little generally over the rest of the bed. It rained this morning and overnight so I am hopefully there wont be damage. The anti slug bait is ready and im ready to fight the war later today!

Sodium chloride. NC omitted to speak about the chlorine part.

No damage (at least none for now that i can see). Just one very salty dead slug beside the chives hah! Have learnt my lesson. Thanks again everyone.

Intersting post CRN. Chard accumulates sodium, and possibly other minerals, and the beta genus evolved seaside in the Mediterranean.
There chard is as popular as here, and when in Italy I was told to eat it without salt (they put salt on everything else), because it has its own. Surely all the members (and therefore also beets) do well in such soils. But I had no idea the C4 cycle required sodium.

The wiki article on plant nutrition is illuminating. It expands more on the sodium function - very interesting, especially the possible substitution for K in some crops. Cl is also a required micronutrient, so in some circumstances sodium chloride as a soil amendment could be helpful. Particularly in a soil with high SOM to buffer it, I should think.

There has been testing of using sea salt as fertilizer with results indicating that at the very least the idea that sodium chloride is categorically bad is suspect.

Actually, side-dressing the soil with sodium is not stupid at all in certain situations. In some places of the world, it is very common for fruit growers to give small amount of sodium to their fruit trees so that the trees will deposit the sodium in their fruits and thus enhance their flavor (notably coconuts).

Plants do not "require" sodium but "tolerate" it by putting away excess sodium in different tissues. While the plants do not want it, we as human would really appreciate the extra flavor sodium can add to the different parts of plants.

A lot of plants actually do require sodium...even discounting C4 plants. Though the amount needed for health rarely needs supplemental amendment help, it is considered an essential micronutrient by many. If we want to be technical about it...there's a chunk of people who don't consider sodium an "essential" micronutrient...and some that do. It's one of the more debatable and debated nutrients out there. I happen to fall into the camp that it's an essential functional nutrient and here's why...

I don't want to get too "heavy" into this, but long distance ion transport in plant tissues is achieved very easily via sodium and it's "negative" effects are excluded in various blocking mechanism sites in the plant's pathway (depending upon the plant). Plants have evolved to use sodium to get solutions in water and plant tissues where it needs to go in a kind of osmosis effect. Sodium is an important "transport nutrient" for many other important processes in many plants even though it is rarely involved in the makeup of many essential plant chemicals/compounds. It accomplishes this better and way more efficiently than any other cation (even potassium).

You can kinda think of sodium as a "movement booster" for both water and complimentary nutrients/compounds/etc in the solution hitching a ride with the Na+ getting where it can do more good in a much faster manner. This action especially aids a lot of quick water movement through the plant and cell walls up until the Na is excluded from the process. This exclusion happens sometimes in the roots, sometimes in parts of the stem, and sometimes all the way to parts of the leaves...partially blocked and sometimes almost fully blocked. Like many things biological, these systems can be "overridden" by an excessive amount of sodium and if the plant cannot deal with excess, damage can occur.

Beyond that, some non-essential benefits from sodium help form chemical pathways for some sugars in crops we enjoy...such as carrots...as well as being quite important to glucose production in sugar beets. Sodium and glucose (sugar) have a somewhat weird, yet important relationship with each other in this respect. It all comes down to energy storage allocation, but it results in sweeter carrots and beets you can make table sugar out of for us humans.

In many C4 plants (especially low-water adapted C4 plants) sodium is a crucial part of the plant's water management scheme...from water movement to stoma control keeping the plants from losing water through transpiration...as well as some other metabolic things which would require a lot more explaining, mostly involving pyruvic acids and their role in glucose use in photosynthesis in C4 plants.

This post was edited by nc-crn on Sun, Oct 6, 13 at 8:00

I have clipped this.

" but long distance ion transport in plant tissues is achieved very easily via sodium and it's "negative" effects are excluded in various blocking mechanism sites in the plant's pathway (depending upon the plant)"

So chard, for example, which explains how it can thrive in somewhat salty soil and can taste "salty". Makes sense with the business with sugar beets since chard and beets are very closely related.

It would be interesting to know if the beta family can be used to remediate slightly salty soils. The Dutch use salt hay first, but I wonder if beets are next.

Seems reasonable to me.