Watering house plants with tonic water

bottled acid rain with a bitter taste.

Quinine will stop them getting malaria or cramp ;-)

..But the sugar will play merry hell with their Type 2 Diabetes

Nick

You could ask on uk.rec.gardening or read some of the items here:

Erm, old co2? I can only think that as the co2 leaches out it rises past the leaves and it increases the co2 for a short time. What other ingredients are there in tonic water other than water?

Brian

Sugar, carbon dioxide, and quinine, in order of weight, and probably a load of other E numbers if it's made by a cheapie maker. Sugar used to be recommended as a way of prolonging the life of cut flowers in a vase.

So more akin to an embalming fluid than a health drink ;-)

bit of sweetener, bit of quinine. Nothing to bother plants id have thought.

I made the mistake of assuming some tins of Schweppes Tonic Water in my mother's house were in date. One mouthful proved very much otherwise; they were a year or so out of the Use by Date, and had clearly deteriorated noticeably.

In message , robgraham writes

Obviously too little gin :-)

Medicinal, certainly. It was first made in the days when the British Empire was very well established in malaria zones. The quinine was used as an anti-malarial medication, but is so bitter that sugar is needed to make it palatable.

and lacing it with gin made it socially acceptable

the same principle as grog

I was just trying to get my head around what ages or goes out of date in a sealed bottle of Tonic water. None of those ingredients should go off so to speak. brain

That's a little like seeing a "Best Before" date on a bottle of water extolling the virtues of being filter over "millions of years" through the rock.

Is there however not some chance that the ingredients will interact with each other?

The problm with plastic bottles of mineral water is that the plasticisers leach into the water over time, and after the "Use by" date, may be at a higher than legally permitted concentration.

Ah. Does that mean that one should not re-use such bottles, or does such leaching stop after a while, or would the cessation of such leaching only be because the bottle is about to crumble to dust?

I've also noticed that the CO2 in sparkling mineral water gets lost over time - presumably because the plastic is slightly permeable, since I've not noticed the same effect when glass bottles are used...