Tom
Member
Quick question - do mixed ferts go bad after time?
Hi TomTom said:4 weeks? Sooo, 5 years of TPN+ sitting in it's bottle? There doesn't look to be anything wrong with it - it's not gone mouldy but I was wondering whether the different nutrients were effected over time.
dw1305 said:Potassium decays with a half-life of 1250 million years, meaning that half of the K atoms are gone after that span of time, so don't store your solution longer than 1250,000,000 years or you will have to use them at double strength.
dw1305 said:Hi all,
No they don't, the only problem would be if you had a precipitate, this would mean 2 of the ions had reacted together to form an insoluble salt (like the iron phosphate complexes). In this case they would remain as an insoluble precipitate, but in a lot of cases warming would get them back into solution.
If you acidify the solutions (and avoid evaporation) they are good eternally, there is nowhere for the ions to go, and I really do mean eternally.
The K+, Mg2+ ions etc on the earth have been here since the planets formation, and were created in the nuclear furnace of a massive yellow giant star (it has to be much, much more massive than our sun to make the heavy elements) billions of years ago, before being blasted into space as part of the nebula following a supernova explosion, and then coalescing from the gas cloud to form the nascent planet Earth.
They don't have a "sell by" date, although they do have a half life. Potassium decays with a half-life of 1250 million years, meaning that half of the K atoms are gone after that span of time, so don't store your solution longer than 1250,000,000 years or you will have to use them at double strength.
cheers Darrel