It’s easy conceptually to understand when animals eat physical food matter, it adds to their own body mass as they grow.
But potted plants grow 2x, 3x, etc their mass while the only (seemingly) inputs are Sun, water and occasional plant food. The soil level doesn’t seem to change much either, so where is the “material” coming from to make the plant bigger? Is it just from what I mentioned, and is there an easy way to understand how those things transforms to plant mass?
Edit: Thanks for all the answers! It unexpectedly helped me understand how plants capture carbon from the air and “store” it physically. I have a new appreciation for my houseplants 🪴
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Plants build cellulose, lignin and other molecules. These molecules are just messy complex webs of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen stuck together.
It’s actually pretty cool, you might remember drawing a few simple molecules in high school chem – take a look at lignin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignin
And plants just manufacture this stuff, from water and air, using sunlight for energy.
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