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Re: What is the best liquid fertilizer !!??!!



> From: Chuck Gadd <cgadd at cfxc_com> 
> Subject: Re: What is the best liquid fertilizer !!??!! 
>  
>... 
>  
> I just recently began to grasp the need for seperate daily and weekly 
> fertilizers.  If I understand it correctly, iron won't remain in the 
> water column for more than a day or two, so it needs to be added more 
> frequently, a little each day instead of once weekly...

Not necessarily, and it may depend on the form of iron that's added.  I'm
currently trying an experiment on this very question, on which I hope to
be able to report in a couple of weeks.

[Fumbles for his laptop and waits for it to restore memory; here it
comes.]

Here's one preliminary unreplicated result:  When the Fe level was below
0.05 ppm (LaMotte test) I changed the water and added DuplaPlant (using
my very last tablet -- sigh) to make about 0.1 ppm, or a trfile more.
Six days later it was decidedly lower, but above 0.05; call it 0.075 if
you like. On the tenth day it was barely below 0.05 ppm (definitely not
zero).

This is in a tank heavily planted with mostly slow-growing plants.  (CO2
regulation, not-hard water, pH 7.0, low levels of algae, with the aid of
SAEs.)

How much Fe you _ought_ to have in the water column keeps being debated;
but whatever it is, the half-life in this case came out around a week.

It's possible that other Fe preparations don't last as long.  That's the
next step in my tests, if I manage to do a water change tonight.


-- 
Dan Drake
dd at dandrake_com
http://www.dandrake.com/