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LinkedIn2018 Opening with a Bang as Nitrate Levels Surge
While most of the strawberry growing community is nestled around the warm fire roasting chestnuts, drinking hot toddies and reflecting on the past year, I've been managing a fairly large amount of communication concerning plant dieback which is almost certainly attributed to high nitrate accumulation from pre-plant fertilizers. Those queries which are accompanied by soil analyses say as much with EC's above four, and nitrates well above the 40 ppm what I would see to be of concern, with one sample even setting my heart racing with a stratospheric print of 220 ppm.
This has been discussed pretty thoroughly in this space before, so I simply provide the links here:
//ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=6538
and a closer analysis of the issue, including soil samples, here:
//ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=6608
We are not looking at getting much benefit from rain for a while, so it's time to run the overhead sprinklers to leach all of this stuff out if high nitrates are the issue in a plant dieback scenario.
