Have you ever noticed that your lawn and garden have an extra "glow" after a thunderstorm? There's science behind that phenomenon.

Lightning from thunderstorms actually has the ability to fertilize your garden.

How this works

First, a disclaimer: Lightning doesn't have to directly strike your garden for positive impacts. I want to make sure nobody tries to channel their inner Thor by summoning a lightning strike. It could just vaporize your tomatoes.

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The process can happen well up in the atmosphere, and it starts with the most prevalent molecule in our air: nitrogen.

Our atmosphere is 78% nitrogen, one of the main ingredients in fertilizer. But atmospheric nitrogen is in a gaseous state and is actually two bonded nitrogen molecules.

Plants cannot use nitrogen in this form, and it requires a lot of energy to break, but that's where lightning comes in.

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Lightning can heat surrounding air to about 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit. 

That is plenty of energy, enough to snap the triple bond of nitrogen molecules, one of the strongest bonds in nature. 

The free nitrogen atoms then combine with oxygen and mix with rainwater, forming nitrates. As this rain falls and hits the ground, it can help your garden and yard to grow.

The process is called nitrogen fixation, and it creates the chemically identical ingredient found in a bag of fertilizer.

All over Earth, there are 44 to 100 lightning strikes per second, which is nearly 8 million strikes a day. That results in a substantial amount of thunderstorm nitrates and natural fertilizer.

Why this matters

Unlike organic fertilizers, which require soil microbes to break them down first, lightning nitrate doesn't wait. The thunderstorm nitrates are immediately available to plants.

Organic fertilizers and manures, for example, have a delay before plants can use them. Soil microbes must break them down into forms that roots can take up, which stalls when soil is cold or dry.

Nitrates arriving in rainwater are already in an available form, and roots can start absorbing them the moment they reach the soil.

That's the real reason a garden looks different after a thunderstorm than after ordinary rain. A storm delivers irrigation and immediately usable nitrogen in the same afternoon. These are two benefits a gardener would otherwise have to buy separately.