The Grass Doctor

liquid plant fertilizer?

can you over dose on the fetilizer for my plants in my fish tank? like it says add once per week? would it be bad or would it help them to do once per day but not as much?

Public Comments

1. It would make little or no difference to your plants and would probably harm the fish in the tank, so I would strongly recommend just sticking to what the product says.
2. A lot depends on what product you are referring to. Flourish Excel, which many people refer to as a fertilizer, would not be a good thing to OD a tank on. The nutrients you are adding (with most commercial products) are stable enough to last the week, so really, there is no reason to put yourself through the extra work. Will it hurt anything? Nope, not a bit. There is actually a very popular method of fertilizing that is actually based on dosing excess. It's called Estimative Index and it was developed by Tom Barr. It can be tailored to any tank size and configuration. The chemicals it uses are ridiculously cheap and it's a super easy system to use. I have been using it for almost 2 years now in tanks that are planted at varying degrees. It works like a charm if you exercise some common sense and dose according to how many plants you have. Never had a bit of trouble. Check it out: http://www.barrreport.com/estimative-index/2819-ei-light-those-less-techy-folks.html
3. It won't harm anything, but you will almost certainly see massive amounts of algae as they use the excess nutrients that your plants don't... Most all fertilizers contain some form of nitrogen (either ammonia or nitrate) as well as phosphate, both of which will quickly fuel algae in conjunction with lighting and the excess of nutrients in the water. Also, for the estimative index to work, you need a considerable amount of plants (as in, a planted tank, not an aquarium with plants) to actually be able to compete with the algae.