I read some posts from last year but could not find anything current.
Anybody had success injecting fertilizer into their drip system?
I bought a cheap venturi injector from China but I have not used it yet.
Hope to try it on the blueberries and the blackberries to give them a “jolt” when they lag.
I plan to use some old Calcium Nitrate on the blackberries and Ammonium Sulfate on the blueberries that are hard as a rock and unusable but I believe it will dissolve easy in some hot water
We had a venturi-type injector on our irrigation setup for the 11 acres of hemp we grew last year. Used it to inject liquid fertilizer and micronutrient solutions while irrigating.
Took a little playing around with to get metering and delivery time frames worked out, but it’s not rocket surgery
We have been using the Ez Flo Fertilizer Injectors for a few years with Jack’s Professional water soluble fertilizers. No issues to report. They do work best (IMO) if you have a system that is applying a larger volume of water from my experience. When we have at least a few hundred feet of drip tape operating they work good. If you reduce that to a couple hundred feet of tape, the system does not seem to apply at the same rate / volume of water.
I use an EZ-FLO with a 3 gallon tank for Blueberries and put soluble fertilizer and acid in it sometimes.The only problem is that the mixture gets weak at the far end.Otherwise,it saves me carrying around buckets of water.
The venturi might be a better way.bb
What kind and rate of acid?
I buy 5 gallon jugs,like those boxed wines,at about 33%,Sulfuric acid(battery),from auto part stores.About a pint is added to the tank,with the flow rate turned at the lowest setting.This way has never harmed the plants,from what can be seen.Sometimes,they’re measured with a cheap pH meter and the reading is near 5.They are all in containers,except for one.bb
My venturi injector works great once I reach 2 GPM, but it will not suck when it is hooked to 150 feet of T tape of Tomatoes. My neighbor uses a $15 injector from Miracle grow on T tape in his small garden so I just ordered one.
Hemp is legal in NC too. Did it work out as well a you expected? Are any pesticides now registered for use on Hemp?
No. the hemp industry appears to largely be populated by liars, cheats, pirates, and incompetents. We encountered very few honest or competent folks(there were a few) along the way - including state and federal Agriculture officials.
Only approved pesticide I’m aware of is a baculovirus product intended for use against tobacco budworm and corn earworm, which attack some varieties at/during flowering and bud production.
Some strains of BT are effective, and have been used by some growers against caterpillars, but it’s not currently approved for use on hemp, even though it’s OMRI listed for organic vegetable production.
I was afraid that may be the case. We went to a few seminars last year but it looked like the folks selling the supplies were going to make a lot of money but the growers were going to do most of the work. Kind of like the folks selling picks and shovels during the goldrush period compared to the gold miners.
I thought approved chemicals may be a problem since some growers here had fungus problems during a wet year last year. I’m not sure how their profit worked out at the end of the season.
I love the idea and hope it works out. Are you growing hemp again this year?
Jury is still out…wife would like to do 3 acres of CBG-dominant. We’ve got all the equipment now, and she wants to keep a hand in the game.
i know we can grow it, and can harvest 3 acres pretty easily - the 11 acres we grew last year was too much for us to harvest in its entirety, without the extensive Hispanic workforce some growers have…I’m just a bit reluctant, not knowing what the market will be going forward, and with all of 2019 crop still on hand.
Heck, if our economy is destroyed, I can’t see folks buying CBD oil when they’re worried about putting food on the table, paying the rent, etc
my greenhouse brawndo injector
from the bottom, a mazzei venturi-type injector, ordinary drip zone pressure regulator, then ordinary irrigation valves. backflow preventer not pictured
injector + pressure regulator in parallel is one of the standard designs that mazzei gives. the idea is that your water coming in is say 50 psi, and your drip system is 30 psi, that gives you 20 psi drop to use for a venturi injector. the key is to size the injector to have less flow than your irrigation zone. in my case I have maybe 3 gpm in my zone and this is a mazzei 287 so its “motive flow” is .5 gpm so it won’t flow so much that the outlet pressure rises above my regulated 30 psi (some flow will still go through the regulator)
you can see I learned this the hard way, I put ght gauge points on when I had a mazzei 484 injector and it didn’t work. it was flowing enough that the outlet pressure was maybe 40 psi, all the flow was going through the injector
there are chinese knock offs of mazzei injectors that are really cheap, I’d go ahead and use one as long as you can decipher the performance stats. the mazzei patents have expired
Thats got what plants crave!
