Question about stinky liquid seaweed

[OrchidThief79]

I bought a bottle of Maxicrop liquid seaweed plus iron. I've never used this brand before. It has a rather strange smell, and its not a kelp smell... it smells like RUST and if it gets on your hands they smell like rust too. I guess it makes sense since it does have iron in it.

Has anyone used this brand? I'm wondering if I got a spoiled batch.

[Daethen]

I'm betting it is the iron. I used to take iron supplement and it smells bad. I have never used the product though.

[Bud]

I use that brand and I dilute it with a capful to a gallon of water...it will lessen the stink if you let it stay overnight at room temperature in a pail or a container before you spray it on the plants.

[tucker85]

I use Maxicrop Liquid Seaweed but I don't use the one with iron in it. The one I use is a dark brown liquid and it does have some odor to it. I get excellent results from it. I don't have any experience with the one that contains iron.

[LavendarSunset]

Do you guys use the liquid seaweed in place of orchid fertilizer, or in addition to it??

[tucker85]

Liquid seaweed is a suppliment only. It's very important to use a fertilizer also. In fact liquid seaweed contains growth enhancers so if your plants are getting liquid seaweed it's even more important that they get a good fertilizer. Last year I added liquid seaweed to my fertilizer every time I fertilized. This year I'm cutting back a little and using liquid seaweed once or twice a month. When I started using it a couple of years ago I noticed a difference in my plants within a few weeks. Good luck.

[LavendarSunset]

Thanks, Tucker85!

[Ray]

I started looking into seaweed concentrates after reading about them here and from folks at the Slippertalk forum.

After much research, I decided that Kelpak (out of South Africa) was probably the best one from a scientific angle, so sought out a US distributor with the SA producer. Apparently they are not anxious to go the "retail route", preferring to sell to large-scale agricultural operations producing fruits, nuts, other food crops, turf and the like, but after a lot of persistence on my part, they finally put me in touch with the sole US distributor.

The guy was nice enough to send me several gallons to play with - this is a liquid with a shelf life of 2-3 years.

I first started adding it to the feeding regimen of my houseplants. Every agalonema (Chinese evergreen) I have is currently blooming. A spathyphyllum my wife kept from a "family death dish planter" some 15 years ago, had not bloomed since....it is now! Dracaenas have all started to put out new growths and new branches like mad.

So it added it to my orchid fertilizer.... WOW! Roots like mad!

This time of year, my vandaceous plants start putting out new roots, but I have never seen anything like this (I added yellow dots to locate each new growth tip):

[OrchidThief79]

So to add to my frustration with this product, aka rusty water, I used it on some newly repotted phals. in sphagnum moss, and now all of the previously golden moss is stained a brownish-green color. On an aesthetic level, I would think twice about using seaweed on sphagnum because the moss absorbs the pigments.

Ray- you mentioned that you looked at the products on a scientific level. What should we be looking for in a "good" liquid seaweed? How are they different?

[Ray]

Originally Posted by OrchidThief79

Ray- you mentioned that you looked at the products on a scientific level. What should we be looking for in a "good" liquid seaweed? How are they different?

I'll throw out a few things that fell into my decision-making:

▲ A liquid product is better than a solid or "meal" product. Dehydration will degrade the natural hormones and other stimulant chemicals.

▲ Among all products, obviously one with a greater quantity of hormones is better than one with less.

▲ One containing a higher level of auxins than cytokinins is preferred.

■ Cytokinins are primarily involved with the cell elongation - i.e., growth. Auxins primarily initiate the formation of adventitious root tips (as seen in my photo, above).

■ Different plants react differently to both classes of chemicals, but if C>A, only the cytokinin reactions occur. If C=A, it can go either way, depending upon the plant, but if A>C, one always gets the auxin reactions occurring.

■When root tips grow, they naturally create cytokinins, so you get root growth and plant growth occurring - a "best of both worlds" scenario, in my mind.