Fertigation ????

[Steve]

What's your view on fertigation? Good idea or bad? Would you like to get involved with this? Metro-east lawn care franchise established - Four Belleville men are banking on "fertigation" to make their investment pay off. Fertigation is fertilizing your lawn through your sprinkler irrigation system and FertiGator is the new company promoting the technique in the metro-east. Kent Weisenstein, Greg Stein, Ken Lickenbrock and Curly Cordell purchased the franchise for the metro-east area which includes St. Clair, Madison, Monroe, Clinton and Jersey counties. The men hired Mike Kirchoff to manage the business, which opened an office at 625 E. Main St. in Belleville in January. Matt East and Steven Boyd sell, install and service the product. "We retrofit existing sprinkler systems," East said. "If you're already watering the lawn, you might as well fertilize it at the same time." The company installs its system and sells a natural fertilizer that the owner can either add to the system himself or herself or have added by the company. "All you have to do is fill the unit," he said. East said the system is close to the cost of conventional lawn treatments the first year but afterwards is cheaper. The equipment costs from $289 for the smallest unit to $559 for the larger, more advanced unit, which can actually apply different amounts of fertilizer in different zones of a larger landscape.

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It's kind of cool that you can have an automated irrigation and fertilization system at the same time, but I would be worried about the runoff

[Steve]

Do you ever have customers who ask for such a service? Would this installation be something that you would like to provide?

I don't know about it. The way the economy is going around here people are staying to just the basics and nothing more

[K C]

We did that for a while when we first started our business in 2000. I think we installed 7. One customer loved it. But for the most part we found that the fertilizer that has to run in it is very expensive. Has to be safe for pets and kids so has to be organic and the right consistency or it will plug up the fertigator. Most customers weren't ready to spend that much money when they still have to pay for an herbicide treatment(usually the same price or not much more if it includes fertilizer)from another company. Of course that was a long time ago maybe they have upgraded the fertigator to work with other fertilizers.

What was your going installation rate for it?

[PositiveEco]

Looking at a similar business model with our company. Do you have any suggestions to move forward with this type of company. Marketing, Partnerships, Etc.?

[Steve]

Have you gotten one property to use this system yet? I would figure once you had one and had some good results, along with testimonials, you would be able to take that and replicate it.

What's your view on that?

[SNethercutt]

I have a customer that does this, but doesn't have an irrigation system he waters with water hoses. He bought a deal of eBay that has a little syphon hose, that uses water flow to syphon stuff into the hose.

He mixes his own fertilizer in a bucket. He uses beer, fish fertilizer, ammonia and other stuff. He always has a lush green yard. He has other ingredients in it and I have them wrote down somewhere.

I would say it works because that's all he uses on his yard and it has looked awesome the last couple years I have been doing it

[Steve]

I wonder if this would be something worthwhile for you to take pictures of and then maybe write a blog post about it on your website in case other customers would be interested in it as well.

Maybe even a newspaper article for your local paper?