If you stop to think about it, you can’t understand why it took so long for people to accept Tom Reilly’s “crazy” idea,
It was simple, as simple and natural as the rain falling from heaven or the sunlight warming the upturned leaves of plants and trees.
Yet for years, all the experts said it couldn’t be done: you couldn’t feed plants through their leaves.
But Torn Reilly kept insisting it could be done. He read all the literature he could find; he talked with university professors and government agronomists.
He tried to persuade other horticulturists to try his foliar plant food. They kept it on the shelf at one experiment station for five years without using it.
But even when the results could be shown to be good, foliar feeding was still only a theory. It took the atomic age and radioisotopes to bring proof.
Reiley’s Theory
This was singular vindication for a man who began his pioneering work almost a quarter of a century before Joliot and Curie discovered artificial radioactivity!
Reilly says now that if he’d known, back in 1907, it would take him 25 years just to win acceptance for his theory, he might have given it up.
But that’s doubtful. There’s a streak of Irish persistence in this man of the soil.
Magic Potion For Plants
Today, his “Ra-Pid-Gro” foliar plant food is on garden supply shelves nationwide.
Many home gardeners regard it as a kind of magic potion—the next best thing to a green thumb. Unfortunately, most of them don’t know, or care, how and why it works; they just know it does.
So when serious scientists finally admitted that Tom Reilly was right, most of his loyal customers simply smiled and said, “I told you, sot.”
They’d been using “Ra-Pid-Gro” since 1932, and even without radioactive isotopes, they had the visual proof of its efficacy.
Reilly’s Early Discovery
They, like Reilly himself, were pragmatic philosophers. And pragmatism led him to his discovery in the first place.
He was just a young man then, one of five sons of an Irish nurseryman who had settled in the lush Genesee Valley of Western New York.
When Tom was in his early twenties, his father gave him a share in the nursery business he owned in Dansville and put the young man in charge of outside growing.
Among his responsibilities was the fate of a large block of cherry trees sold on contract.
During a prolonged dry spell, Tom and one of his brothers applied some dry fertilizer along the rows, but this proved to be a mistake.
Many of the leaves turned yellow and dropped off. However, the leaves on some cherry trees had been sprayed with liquid plant food; these were the first to perk up and turn green.
This made young Tom think that an all-purpose liquid plant food to be applied to the foliage might be the quickest and most efficient way to fertilize.
As a lad, he had put in many long, hard hours, along with his brothers, handling tons of dry fertilizer.
Like many other boys, he thought there must be an easier way. Now, he’s determined to try to find it.
Even his father discouraged him, saying it couldn’t be done. But young Tom stubbornly went to work, mainly on the roses around his dad’s place.
He treated them like babies, even adding to the formula vitamins such as B-1 and B-2, which he purchased from Merck’s wholesale drug company.
Eventually, someone at the drug company heard of his work and mentioned it at Cornell University, where Reilly had taken a course in 1910 on insect and disease control and identification.
But Cornell was still not ready to accept foliar feeding as a recommended practice.
His First Formulas
By 1913, when his father retired, young Tom was boss of the nursery, with all the responsibilities that went with it.
It was a thriving business: the Reillys had been the first to sell nursery stock to big department stores like Macy’s and Woolworth’s. The repeat business was good, and there was new business to be developed.
Still, Tom worked away at his idea—that an all-around plant food supplying all the necessary minerals and trace elements in proper proportion and applied to plants and trees through the foliage was the cheapest and most efficient way to feed plants.
His first formulas were mixed in an old butter churn and a coffee grinder. Since Reilly’s knowledge of chemistry was limited, he had to spend much of his spare time boning up on the subject.
Experimentations of Tom
With a few barrels, some scales, and a thermometer, he worked nights and weekends trying different combinations of chemicals and water, experimenting with them on nursery stock.
With ten-hour work days and horse-and-wagon transportation, it was an arduous life. The first World War knocked the props out from under Reilly Brothers’ nursery business.
The firm went bankrupt, and Tom Reilly started doing landscape work for such firms as Endicott-Johnson and Standard Oil.
He remained in New York State, making his headquarters in Endicott and Binghamton and continuing his experiments out of a rented garage.
Tom Reilly’s “Secret”
He had a fine opportunity to use his soluble plant food on his landscape jobs.
But even when he could demonstrate results, the experts remained skeptical. They figured it was just “Tom Reilly’s way of growing things.”
By 1932, he was satisfied with the formula he had developed. There was a water-soluble plant food that could be applied through the foliage without danger of burning and that would produce visible results within a few days.
The formula is virtually the same one being used in “Ra-Pid-Gro” today, and though it is partially spelled out on the label, no one has ever successfully copied the exact formulation. That remains Tom Reilly’s “secret.”
How He Introduced It
Reilly offered to spray selected blocks of nursery stock to introduce his product and let the nurserymen judge for themselves.
The results were usually dramatic, for seeing was believing. But Reilly’s problem was to help people see.
It was six years before he tried selling it retail. One of the first outlets he tried was Woolworths in New York.
The buyer there suggested that instead of bottling his product, Reilly produce it in dry form for the home gardener to mix himself.
This was the first really constructive suggestion Reilly had had from anyone, encouraging him to go ahead.
But the battle was not yet won. He still had to stump the country from Maine to California to sell people his foliar plant food.
Once when he was trying to persuade a prominent plant pathologist and writer to test his product, he got an unexpected assist from the bartender at the Waldorf in New York.
“Get me some more of that stuff, Mr. Reilly,” the man said. “My wife thinks it’s great.” Whether this word-of-mouth testimony turned the tide is not known, but the scientist later paid tribute to Reilly as the man who had pioneered foliar feeding.
Well-Known Ra-PidGro
And so it went: nurserymen told nurserymen; home gardeners compared results; and eventually, “Ra-PidGro” caught on enough to reward Reilly for the long years of time and effort he had put into it.
But it remained for the atomic age to give a scientific foundation to the whole structure Reilly had built.
Use of Radioactive Isotope
One day in 1954, in the caucus room of the House Office Building in our nation’s capital, the Subcommittee on Research and Development of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy held an open hearing at which some very interesting material was presented.
The speaker was Dr. H. B. Tukey, head of the department of horticulture at Michigan State College and a former Cornell professor.
What he had to tell the committee related to the use of radioactive isotopes in tracing techniques.
He showed how the whole field of plant nutrition was affected by the certain knowledge that the leaves of plants have an absorption mechanism that functions like a blotter drawing nutrients into the plant.
Up to now, the scientist pointed out, many believed that only the root system could draw nourishment.
But the isotope technique proved this wrong, and “now we find the textbooks are rewritten, and the leaf is reported as a beautiful mechanism for absorption.”
And, since the leaves of plants offer so much more surface for feeding, foliar fertilization is almost 10 times more efficient than other methods!
Five years later, the American Horticultural Council honored Torn Reilly with a citation: “for demonstrating in a practical way that plants could be fertilized through their leaves.
For being the first to develop and market an effective plant food for foliar feeding; and opening the way to a new cultural practice in horticulture.
Crazy Idea Of Tom
Tom Reilly was 74 years old then. He’s 77 now—and just as enthusiastic about his “crazy idea” as he was when he started.
His plant and offices are in the old homestead where he was born. He lives across the road in a modern ranch house with a magnificent garden that shows the results of love and care.
And high up in the hills are 525 acres of working farmland where Tom Reilly still works with growing things.
Look out for him; he may get another “crazy idea” one of these days.
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