A good friend of mine, realizing I get lazy and often skip fertilization schedules, recommended that I purchase a temperature controlled release fertilizer. He has friends in the Ag industry and said that the Temperature controlled release fertilizers are much better than the other slow release types that are based off of moisture alone because there is less waste and the plants get more nutrients when it is hot when they are more metabolically active and get very little fertilizer release when temps are cold and the plants are dormant. He especially recommended I try it on my potted plants as frequent watering can wash away much of the regular fertilizers.
He said that Nutricote was something that's readily available online and Mark in Texas recommended Polyon. There wasn't a Polyon distributor near me and they had so many formulations, it was difficult to navigate their site so I decided to go with Nutricote. The Nutricote was very expensive to buy in small amounts from EBay and Amazon, around $10/lbs. I finally found a company that sold it in bulk but it was sold under the name Florikan out of Florida. This product uses Nutricote, it looks like the exact same thing except this product says two stage. I got the 18-6-8 formulation with Micros in the 180 day but they sent me the 270 day, I'm not complaining. Here are some pictures from the bag I received.
Anyone here use this relatively new technology in their fertilizer regime? I will be using these in my raised beds and pots. I still have issues with my ultra high pH soil for my in ground trees so I will need to lower the pH of the soil with Sulfur as I have been doing, for this fertilizer to really be effective for my in ground trees. One application should last my lazy butt a whole year but I plan on using reduced rates(VS the recommended application rates) so that I can drench with non controlled release fertilizers during growth spurts when I know my plants definitely need more nutrients.
Anybody have suggestion? Thanks,
Simon