Confused about Potassium
I am confused about potassium and would love to hear your experiences and thoughts.
I understand that Potassium is one of the three "macro nutrients" (nitrogen and phosphorus being the other two) and that Potassium (K) is important for blooming.
Recently read the "Slipper Talk" article that describes the research which led its author to feel that potassium sometimes, for some plants, can lead to problems. Sometimes the plants do quite well and bloom well, and then give out after a few years.
This led to the development of the "K-Lite" formula. From what I have read, some people have had great success and others -- not so much, to the extent that they abandoned the reduced -K formula.
OK, so, confused already, I read an article by Martin Motes (the "October" entry in this month in your . . . .) I found my way to this article because I had received (from Motes) three vanadaceous plants that arrived very, very purple. Bart told me that it was caused by cold leading to magnesium deficiency. So I read up and found the article that his father authored describing using Epsom Salts. But -- here's where my confusion really peaked -- he recommended adding in Potassium Nitrate with the Epsom Salts.
I will share my confused journey with you thus far. My orchids were doing so-so and I decided to use a couple of humidifiers -- which really helped. These are hot, not cold, and that was fine; everything was working well. But we have moderately hard water and every week the level of accumulated salts in the humidifiers was appalling. I decided we needed a whole house softener, and very shortly after completing the installation, I learned that the sodium that gets substituted in the softening process for the minerals in my water would kill my plants! Discovered this just in time -- hauled the sodium salts back to the store, and bought potassium (at about 4x the price). OK, I thought everything is fine, and orchids like potassium right?
Well, now I am embarrassed to ask my husband, (who at my request, installed the softener, and hauled the salts) to install a bypass so that I can have a spigot in the house that will give me the original hard water --just for the orchids. (We use the unsoftened water for the garden too)
Are you laughing yet?
Is anyone else as confused as I am? or hopefully, armed with experience and recommendations that you would be willing to share?
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