My dad maintains veg tastes better with organic fertiliser...

Will Pearson, by email

Stefan says: Plants don’t make use of fertilisers in the chemical form in which they’re provided, but after they’ve been converted in the soil to more basic components. Nitrogen to a plant is nitrogen, whether it originates in ammonium sulphate or dried blood.

Taste is, of course, a subjective matter and if you believe you can detect a difference, all well and good; it may have some basis in scientific fact, yet the evidence is lacking. In view of the many chemical processes that go to make up that curious phenomenon called flavour, I’m astonished, not so much that the type of fertiliser can affect it, but that an organic fertiliser should always change it in ways that we consider an improvement.

There’s no scientific evidence that organic fertiliser makes vegetables taste better