The high salinity of the water in nurseries advises the use of fertilizers that do not increase conductivity such as Osmocote® and Peters®

Due to the lack of rainfall that many areas of Spain have been suffering in recent months, the quality of water for use in nurseries is becoming increasingly worse and the use of regenerated water, from wells with high salinity or from desalination plants, is becoming widespread.

Reclaimed water usually contains a very high amount of salts and undesirable elements, which harms the correct development of plants. The salt coming from the desalination plant is not really free of salts, although it generally does not have many (approximate range of 0.6mSiemens), but the vast majority of these salts are composed of sodium chloride (common salt), which means that when these two elements are very present and contributed continuously, produce an accumulation of them in the substrate.

Regarding the use of well water, it is known that its quality has worsened due to the very low level of water they carry, so the water is taken from highly salinized areas at the bottom of the same well (aquifer).

All this leads us to the conclusion that with irrigation water with conductivities with high values (1.8-2.5 mSiemens or more), the margin we have left to fertigate is very small, and since adding water with high levels of salts and the salts of fertilizer can reach toxic levels for many crops.

In order not to increase the salts that the irrigation water already contains, at ICL we propose the use of Osmocote^® mixed in the substrate and applications in fertigation of Peters®, which is a fertilizer that barely increases the electrical conductivity without therefore reaching the toxic values mentioned. The purity of the fertilizers in the Peters® range means that with a small amount applied, the availability and use of the fertilizers is maximum.