Re: Nepenthes and Hard Water

From: Sean Barry (sjbarry@ucdavis.edu)
Date: Mon Jan 25 1999 - 12:00:21 PST


Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 12:00:21 -0800 (PST)
From: Sean Barry <sjbarry@ucdavis.edu>
To: cp@opus.hpl.hp.com
Message-Id: <aabcdefg223$foo@default>
Subject: Re: Nepenthes and Hard Water

On Mon, 25 Jan 1999, Carl Strohmenger (HSC) wrote:

> I routinely use city tap water on all my yard plants including Nepenthes.
> No ill effects so far (2-years).

Different cities have vastly different water. San Francisco's water,
which is snow-melt from Hetch-Hetchy reservoir in the Tuolumne River
canyon of the Sierra Nevada, is quite soft and probably entirely suited
for all but the delicately picky (about water) plants. Travel a few miles
to Fremont or any of the East Bay cities that obtain their water from
wells, and the story is very different--that water is generally grossly
hard (to 28ppm dissolved solids and even much higher in some locales) and
is also often laced with elements that in moderate concentrations are
quite phytotoxic. A good northern California example of that is boron.
That water isn't really suitable for any plant. It's best to form
absolutely no generalities about municipal water--some are as good as they
get, others are worse than terrible. Test it, and use it if it's OK,
don't if it's not, no matter what you've heard.

Sean Barry



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Jan 02 2001 - 17:31:54 PST