The Volusia County Council has adopted a summertime fertilizer ban and initiated other restrictions to protect the local waterways.
Ordinance 2014-09 applies to all homes and businesses in Volusia County except those in Deltona and Debrary, which have their own fertilizer ordinances. The new ordinance includes these provisions: The application of fertilizer containing Nitrogen and Phosphorus is prohibited from June 1 through September 30 of each year. Fertilizer may not be applied within 15 feet of water bodies. Fertilizer containing Nitrogen may be applied only between Oct. 1st and May 31 and must contain no less than 50% slow release Nitrogen. With all of this said I would like to come back to one of my past blogs about a hypoxic zone. On September 16, 2015, almost days before you the fertilizer ban was over, Canal street canal, a subterranean canal located right on the edge of businesses and active floods, was measured with a dissolved oxygen content under 2 mg/L. In reading my latest posts especially the one about Hypoxia, I state that this could very likely have been due to an overabundance in nutrient in the biovolume leading to an algae bloom which eventually took over the oxygen in that area. Are people disobeying these bans on fertilizer and still continuing to do this to their lawn annually without a time of practicing florida friendly landscape techniques maybe these laws should be enforced.
Non-point sources of pollution, which include fertilizer runoff, contribute significant amounts of nutrients to our water bodies. Runoff from improper use of fertilizer can contribute to nitrogen and phosphorous pollution in surface waters and ground water. Attached is a list of summer safe fertilizers that comply with fertilizer laws and are formulated to help prevent water pollution
http://www.volusia.org/core/fileparse.php/4180/urlt/summer-safe-products.pdf
For those who don’t know me yet I am Mason Sylvester and I am
doing a project on earthworms and how chemical fertilizers impact them. I am
measure this by how many die in a fish tank over a three week period. Time
might change but is going to be around the time frame. The types of worms that I
am going to be using are night crawlers which are the most common type of
earthworm we have around here or that everyone is familiar with.The picture to the right is a night crawler. Their vertical
burrowing earthworms which is perfect for my project. The way I am going to be
doing this is I will have 4 fish tanks that are five gallons each and then I will
put soil from my backyard that is not been fertilized and then put ten worms
in. From
their I will spray water four times a week, that number might change but should
be around four. I will then put fertilizer into three of the tanks and using
the instructions on the fertilizer so I don’t have anything that is different
from any of the tanks except the amount that is being applied. The type of fertilizer
I used will be in the link I provide (fertilizer)
. The fourth tank will not have any fertilizer. They will be place in a dark
area with no sunlight so they don’t fry. After three weeks I will count the number of
dead worms for each tank and record the data into a graph for comparison. I will also put organic matter into each fish
tank for food so that they don’t die of starvation instead of the fertilizer.