Thursday, December 29, 2011

Winter salting


Rock salt (sodium chloride) can harm your plants and rob the soil of nutrients. Ice-melt products made of potassium chloride, magnesium chloride or calcium chloride are slightly less harmful; they are less corrosive and they contain nutrients that plants can use.

    Don’t bother applying ice melt when temperatures are extremely cold. Rock salt will be effective down to 15˚F. Calcium chloride will be effective down to 5˚F. There’s no product that will work below 5˚F unless you apply it very, very heavily.

1 comment:

allanbecker-gardenguru said...

Thanks, this information is helpful. However, when you write that ice-melt is slightly less corrosive to plants, I interpret that to mean that it still may do harm.