what will happen if I water a plant with salt water?

Question

please answerrr......

Answer 1

It depends upon the plant and how much you give it. Many plants are well adapted to seashore environments where they are regularly exposed to salt water and it does them no harm.

Chemical fertilizers are salts. Most of the salts leach out, but too much will burn or kill a plant.

Answer 2

It's not salt which is the problem. All living things (on Earth, anyway) need some salt. But too much salt is poisonous to plants, just as it is to animals (such as ourselves).

When there is too much salt in the soil, which happens if it is regularly flooded with salt-water (or if poor land management leads to salinization), then plants take too much in through their roots and too much gets into their tissues (that is, into the cells of their roots, stems and leaves). This excess salt interferes with the chemical reactions in cells which the plant needs to make food and to grow. As a result, the plant's growth is stunted and the plant may even die.

But salt has another effect: it starves the plant of water. In the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge are the famous lines:

Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

Plants have a similar problem when their roots are bathed in salty water: they can actually die of thirst!

This happens because the salt interferes with the way in which plant roots take in water. Plants rely on a process called osmosis to get water from the soil.The tissue around the tiny hairs on plant roots allows water to pass through easily (it is very permeable to water) but it only allows salts and other chemicals through very slowly (it is less permeable to these). When water in the soil is fresh, it tends to flow into the roots, then is sucked up the stem to the leaves. When the water in the soil is salty, water tends to be sucked out of the roots into the soil. [You can demonstrate this by doing a simple experiment. Simply peel a potato and put it in a jar of very salty water. After a few hours it will start to shrivel up as the salt (sort of) sucks the water out of the potato (actually out of the potato cells).

Answer 3

Some plants survive in saltwater, but are in their natural habitat. Fresh water plants MUST have water that does not contain a toxic level of salt, or it will not survive. Most plants will die if watered with saltwater. If you recall the famous salt flats in Utah. This is an old lake bed of salt, and nothing grows there. Have Fun!

Answer 4

It's cells will be damaged and the plant will die.
There are however, plants (trees) that withstand salt water. The most famous of these is the coconut tree. That's why you see so many of them on tropical shore lines.

Answer 5

the saltyness will make the plant shrivel and die because it extracts the water from it..
i learned about this.

its also why when you put salad dressing on a salad and then leave it, it will take all the water out of the leaves, and they will go bad.

Answer 6

it will die, maybe not the first time you do it but eventually it will kill it

Answer 7

it would most probably most certainly die