So, earlier this season, we mentioned some quality of life improvements we made this year. This one might not “seem” like much, but it’s been a game changer, saving us hours of time.
Yes, these aren’t “new” to us around here. This is our typical Rubbermaid trash can done up like a rain barrel. We use these all the time as reservoirs and for our rain water catchment. They’re rugged, hold up well in our harsh climate and are very easy to put together with a simple bulkhead and a Christmas tree bit.
What we’re using this one for is to mix up water soluble fertilizers. As many of you know, we heavily practice fertigation at our homestead gardens, so we’re making hundreds of gallons of water soluble fertilizer solution every season. We used to do this in 5 gallon buckets, sometimes two at a time. This upgrade got us to 30 gallon batches, which we can easily feed into buckets or watering cans.
An unforeseen benefit has been that we can now control the nutritional levels very precisely. We’re mixing this nutrient to our “maximum dose” that we’d use for tomatoes, but then we can fill a bucket to 50% or 75% and top off the remainder with rain water. This easily allows us to drop down the nutrient strength and also makes that fertilizer go even further!
A big part of this change was getting into hydroponics. We had to make up much more nutrient water than we have in the past. But, it’s been incredibly useful for our sub irrigated systems and even fertilizing by hand, too! At any point, if we need to fertilize a plant, we have it ready to go!
Mixed water soluble fertilizers have a shelf life of a couple weeks in a storage container like this. We’ve found the 30 gallon to be the perfect size for our gardens and we can easily stay underneath that shelf life.
We did consider using a fertilizer injector system instead. These systems essentially mix in a fertilizer concentrate into a water hose at a particular dosage rate. However, these systems are insanely expensive for what they are (a venturi siphon), whereas a system like this is a bit more work. For our scale, a simple solution like this just makes more sense.
We practice fertigation because it helps turbo-fuel our plant’s growth. This aids us in the seasonal race that we’re in, where we have three months to get to the finish line and it maximizes our harvests across all our plants. We don’t have time for nutritional deficiencies and other problems.
We’re loving this new system. I tend to be the “fertilizer guy” in our growing practice, but it’s really easy to tell Kayde to just fill 50/50 or 75/25 to get the desired outcome.
