Most Florida governments enact a fertilizer ban during the rainy season that began June 1st.
For example, Pinellas County prohibits the sale or use of lawn and landscape fertilizers containing nitrogen or phosphorus until September 30th.
The county has been using this ban since 2010 in hopes of understanding how different nutrients enter the waterways.
Anamarie Rivera, Pinellas County’s environmental program manager, said that as a local government, they are responsible for the quality of the surface water, and they want to improve it.
“Harmful algal blooms, regular filamentous algae blooms, even red tide is an algae, and any of those, while naturally occurring, become exacerbated or have blooms when there is nutrient enrichment in our surface waters,” said Rivera.
The frequent heavy rain in the summers will wash off any fertilizer from lawns into storm drains, which leads directly to large bodies of water, including Tampa Bay.
When excess nitrogen and phosphorus enter the water, it causes algae blooms that lower oxygen levels and kill fish.
Rivera said iron is a great component in fertilizer that can green your lawn and is a summer-safe product.
“We’ve worked with retailers really closely over the last 15 years, and making sure that we provide a list to them of products, also available on our website,” said Rivera. “So if your retailer has summer safe products on the shelf, those are fine to use, they’re not going to pollute our waterways, like nitrogen or phosphorus would.”
The county provides other safe summer products, including compost, an irrigation rain-shutoff device, and others, which can be found on their website.
Leave a Reply
