Vegetable plant roots absorb nutrients through two distinctly different sequential processes. First, the nutrients must move from the soil to the surface of the plant roots. Second, the nutrients must be able to cross from the outside to the inside of the plant roots. Once the nutrient gets inside the plant, the nutrients can move upward to the leaves and developing vegetable.
Justus von Liebig, a 19th century German chemist, made great contributions to the science of plant nutrition and soil fertility. While Carl Sprengel, a German botanist, formulated the “theory of minimum,” Liebig investigated and popularized the scientific concept we know today as “Liebig’s Law of the Minimum.” This concept demonstrates that plant growth is not controlled by the total amount of available resources but by the scarcest.