The important thing to know here is that there are 2 specific ways to "feed/grow" you plants. Some people prefer to grow everything "
organically", meaning that everything about feeding the plants is done the same way as nature would. You get naturally derived nutrients from organic materials like worm, chicken, bat, bird, and cow **** and mix with natural soil that has no "synthetically derived nutrients". Then the part that makes this soil truly organic is that there is either beneficial microbes present in the soil, or you add these beneficial microbes to the soil (or a little of both). The microbes are essential here because
THEY do all the work of taking the "raw" materials in the organic soil and breaking them down so that the plants can absorb them. This process that we refer to here is called
chelation. A fancy term for making the nutrients available to the plants.
The other type of growing/feeding is "
synthetic" feeding/growing. In this case, you can use a variety of "growing mediums" to hold the plants so that the synthetically derived nutrients can be pushed around the roots during watering. Synthetically derived nutrients are still derived often from organic or natural elements on the planet but they are extracted through chemical processes in "factory" settings. There's nothing wrong with either method, just different ways of doing things.
With the synthetic nutrients,
YOU do all the work of making sure the plants are able to get the nutrients that they need by controlling the
pH in the medium.
With organic nutrients, the
microbes do all that work, but it is then up to you to give the microbes what they need to survive and do what they need to do.
This is where the
molasses comes in. It is used to directly feed the microbes to get them going. Once they get established in the growing medium, they will break down the raw materials and give them to the plants. The plants will pay the microbes with natural sugars that the microbes need. Most organic growers will periodically use molasses to make sure the
microbe herd stays fed and healthy as they are the life and death of the plants in organics.