My new way to fertilize

[ArronOB]

I’d better say at the beginning - this is new to me but I’d imagine it’s old news to experienced growers and nothing particularly useful to those with large collections

Anyway, my collections consist of somewhere from 100 to 200 plants, growing outside in a couple of small shadehouses or in baskets hanging from trees. Fertilising has always been my problem due to the time involved. I recently decided to dispense with this great consumption of time and bought an in-line fertiliser system to attach to my primitive overhead watering system. It worked well - or would have if my goal was to fertilize the shelving or the concrete shadehouse floor. So today I was in the hardware store and spotted the device in the attached image. Bought it, tried it, loved it.

Basically you set the orange dial to the amount of water required to do your collection. Mine required 12 litres, so I set the orange dial to 3 which dispenses about 15 litres. Then I back-calculated how much fertiliser matched 15 litres of water (45ml for the brand i use), put that in the reservoir and topped up the reservoir with water. Then I just squirt each plant pot. I keep my thumb on the thumb bar thingee and constantly and intuitively adjust the flow for a heavy rain on each pot without knocking it over. Love it, all done in a few minutes, no leaks or drips, very little wastage or interplant splashing.

It’s of fairly simple design with no overly small orifices in the pathway so I’m expecting it to handle seaweed extract and soluble fertiliser just as well.

For our Australian members it’s a Holman Quick Mix although I expect similar devices are available in every market.

I expect I’m about to be told that these have been around for years but it’s the first time I’ve seen one.

Cheers

[Dusty Ol' Man]

These have been around for years! (Couldn't resist.) But it's true. My question is if you are fertilizing with every watering, how are you calculating your mix? And what concentration are you feeding?

[Ray]

I do much the same.

When my plants are outside (7-8 months of the year), I use a garden hose with water-breaker to irrigate them. (Fortunately, my tap water is very pure.). Once a week, I want to feed them a 100 ppm N fertilizer solution, so I use an Ortho Dial-and-Spray device for that (and for Kelpak and Quantum, when I apply those).

Dusty - to answer your question, the Ortho device has a variable ratio and a 1-quart tank. I always keep a fertilizer concentrate on hand that is calculated to provide a 100ppm N solution when diluted 1 ounce per gallon, so I just set the Ortho to the “1 oz/gal” ratio and add 8 ounces of my concentrate to its tank, giving me 8 gallons of solution.

[Keysguy]

I use a Chapin for both fertilizer and soluble pesticide application. They are all basically the same approach but the bottom line is that's it's all about doing the math and getting the actual ratio you are looking for coming put the spray end.

[Dimples]

I love hose-end-sprayers. Never actually used one for fertilizing since I have very few potted outdoor plants so everything gets granular fertilizer a few times a year, but they’re very handy.