John Kempf shows how to make a foliar spray for seedlings by scaling down greenhouse recommendations to a quart bottle. He walks through calibrating a hand sprayer, mixing Macropack, Micropack, and SeaStem, and shares practical tips like spraying in the evening and shaking products before use.
Questions this video answers
1.5 ounces Macropack and 0.75–1.0 ounce each of Micropack and SeaStem per 1000 ft².
2 mL Macropack and 1 mL each of Micropack and SeaStem per 50 ft².
6 ounces per 10 ft² (measured by starting at ~15 oz in the bottle and ending at ~9 oz).
About 30 ounces (~1 quart) per 50 ft² in the demonstrated sprayer.
A baby-medicine syringe (available at pharmacies) to measure milliliters.
Chapters
Hey everybody, it's John from AEA here. Today I'm going to be making a really simple foliar spray for seedlings in this greenhouse. This is a foliar that's really easy to make in small quantities, like for just a hand sprayer. And applying a foliar at this time of year gives your plants just a really great boost and you get a lot of bang for your buck. It's really easy to do. I'm going to show you how what I'm showing you here is going to work regardless of the scale you're at. So here in my little home, backyard, greenhouse, I'm going to use just a hand spray bottle. You could just as easily use a one gallon hand sprayer, a backpack sprayer, if you're in a larger greenhouse or, you know, all the way up. The math is a little trickier with small quantities, so I'm going to focus on that here. So this foliar is going to be made up of three macropack, micropack and seastem. Macropack is a blend of six macronutrients, as the name suggests, NPK and also calcium, magnesium and sulfur. Micropak is a blend of 8 micronutrients, your zinc, boron, molybdenum, etc. And SeaStem is seaweed concentrate. That's super effective. The rates we suggest for this vegetative stage foliar are an ounce and a half of macro and 3/4 to 1 ounce of both micro and system per 1000 square feet. Now, obviously what I'm doing here is way less than 1,000 square feet, so I'm going to scale that down. So how that formula works, when you scale it down to per 50 square feet is 2 ML of Macropack and 1 ML each of Micropack and C stem. So the first thing we need to do, as with any foliar spray, whether you're using a spray bottle or an airblast sprayer all the way up, is to calibrate your sprayer. So basically I want to know how much volume of spray is going to cover how much area in square feet. Now, this staging table I have back here with the plants on it happens to be exactly 10 square feet. So that's pretty easy math. I just have to note here on my sprayer where the volume is to start. And we're at about 15 ounces. So I'm just gonna spray this whole thing with water and see how much volume will cover my 10 square feet. So here we go. Okay. It was as easy as that you want to make sure you're applying, you know, the density of spray that you would for a foliar spray. So to coat the leaves with relatively large droplets until. Until you get just the beginning of dripping off, that's about the amount that you want to foliar. So I said I started at 15. Now I'm down to about 9. And so that's 6 ounces per 10 square feet. So that's actually super easy math because that means it's about 30 ounces per 50 square feet in this bottle. 30 ounces, about a quart. This is a quart bottle. So that means in this whole spray bottle, I'm only going to put 2 ML of Macropack, 1 ML each of micro pack. Let me top this off with water to get the full 30 ounces and then we'll go from there. All right, so I've got my sprayer filled up. I've got 32 ounces. And so I'm going to put roughly a milliliter each of micropack and system and 2ml of the macro pack. How do you measure milliliters, you may ask? This is a really handy tool. It's a syringe that comes with baby medicine. You can get it at a pharmacy if you don't have it for a couple bucks or, you know, whatever other way. You have to measure milliliters. First thing very important, shake all these products really well. They're natural, they're minerals. Minerals are heavy. They tend to settle. So shake everything. Okay, I've shaken them now, so now I'm just gonna measure out 2 ML macro pack. That's 2 ML. Just squirt it in there. 1 ML micro pack. And 1 milliliter of the sea stem. Okay, that's it. I'm just going to put the cap back on and shake it really well. Now, normally we would recommend also adding a little bit of micro 5000, which is a biological microbial, inoculate to a full year. Since I'm not going to use all this spray bottle today, it's just going to be sitting in the greenhouse. I don't want to put biologicals in here, but if you're going to use up your whole whatever size thing you have, then micro 5000 is a great addition to just to get the biological action. I'm not going to put this on my plants now because it's daytime and I want to put it on in the evening so it can sit on the leaves for the longest amount of time before it evaporates, but this will be ready to go. I'm just going to shake it up really well before I use it. And then you just have to spray, that's all. Enjoy. Happy planting.
