Quote:
Originally Posted by spacetogrow
Can anyone think of any problems that might arise if I occasionally dose garden plants with lemon juice, lime juice or vinegar if they are well diluted?
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Depends what you mean by high pH. Let's start with the idea that the pH of the water dictates the pH of the soil. And from that, the pH of the soil dictates the mineral nutrients that are available to plants. For tomatoes and many other garden plants, the ideal pH is around 6.2. Spraying your plants isn't going to help. The correction that is needed is in the location where the feeding is occurring. Now if you are foliar feeding, then getting the solution to a pH of about 6.2
prior to adding nutrients is a good idea.
Those of us who live in the southwestern U.S. are accustom to dealing with municipal or well water that is alkaline; e.g., pH greater than 7, and for many of my customers pH between 8.5 and 10. Geez, in these conditions we need to apply an acidifying fertilizer and lots of iron & carbon before getting anywhere with non-native plants.
In my experience, gardeners to the east of the Rocky Mountains deal with water supplies that are acidic (pH less than 7) and some of them have to compensate in reverse to get the pH up to the 6.2 range for their fruit crops. In the extreme, I have a few customers in NE Maine with a municipal water supply of pH 4.5!
There are exceptions of course, I'm working with some farmers in Ohio who have well water that is consistently pH 7.8. These folks also want to be cleared for USDA NOP (organic certification). The approach here is to pump the water into a 20k gallon tank and to buffer it with naturally occurring or food industry by-product calcium sulfate. Extracting off the top of the tank through a mesh filter we have very clean water with pH about 6.8. To this we can insert certified-organic water-soluble fertilizers.