# Fertilizing through irrigation zone



## charveyspears (Apr 24, 2021)

I'm hoping someone can tell me if my idea for fertilizing my flower bed will work or not. I have a five zone irrigation system. Zone #5 is solely for the flower/bush bed. The irrigation pipe is underground and feeds the plants underground. That zone waters the bed three times a week and that seems to be the right amount of water. I would like to use liquid plant food to fertilize the bed once a week. I've had good results from doing that manually in the past. However, I would like to automate that process. Maybe I'm lazy but I don't want to go to all the work of installing a valve and new pipe that goes to exactly the same plants as my #5 zone. I would like to hook up a liquid feeder to my zone five. However, seeing as that zone runs three times a week I have a problem. If I hook the feeder up directly to the zone it will feed the plants 5 times a week which is way too much. If I hook up the zone and change the schedule to once a week the bed won't get nearly enough water.

So I thought up a design that require minimal work but I'm not sure my design will break the valves or cause some other problem. In a nutshell I would like to hook up two valves to zone 5. One valve feeds normal water to zone 5 and is turned on M, W, F. The other valve is hooked up to zone 5 through a liquid feeder and only runs on Saturday. This enables me to manage the water and the liquid fertilizer separately. I've created a diagram to show my idea.

I will put check valves after each of the valves in order to keep the back pressure from the open valve from getting to the closed valve. I've never used check valves before so my design is base on pure theory at this point.

I've also included two pics of my current zone #5. One shows the manifold, with the zone 5 valve to the far right in the pic. You almost can't see the valve. The other pic shows the brown piping used for zone 5.

So my question is does anyone see a problem with this? Is there a better or more obvious way to do what I'm trying to do?

Thanks for any help.


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## SCGrassMan (Dec 17, 2017)

Look up Fertigator. And its crucial you have a properly functioning backflow preventer.


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## Mightyquinn (Jan 31, 2017)

Also check out EZFLO, but I don't think there is anyway to turn it off remotely but you could adjust it to where it's feeding less with each watering cycle so the plants could theoretically get the same amount of fertilizer over the week instead of getting it all at once.


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