Seachem Flourish Iron 500mL- Highly concentrated (10,000 mg/L) iron source for the planted aquarium.
- Ferrous gluconate iron.
- Ferrous gluconate is better suited to foliar feeding than iron-EDTA.
Overview:Flourish
Iron is a highly concentrated (10,000 mg/L) ferrous iron gluconate
supplement. Plants are able to much more easily derive a benefit from
Flourish Iron because ferrous iron gluconate is already in the ferrous
form so they do not expend energy reducing it. Despite what other
manufacturers may intimate, gluconate is not harmful to plants or fish.
In fact, ferrous gluconate is better suited to foliar feeding than is
iron-EDTA owing to the relatively weaker iron-gluconate bonding vs.
iron-EDTA bonding. In addition, ferrous gluconate has the added bonus of
being a source of carbon.
Iron is immobile in plants. This means
that plants cannot divert iron from older leaves to new ones.
Therefore, deficiency symptoms appear first on new or young leaves.
Because plants use iron to produce chlorophyll, a lack of iron results
in chlorosis, or yellowing, of the younger leaves. Stems may also appear
short and slender. If the deficiency is severe and prolonged, each new
leaf emerges lighter in color than the preceding leaf.
When
choosing an iron supplement, it is important to know the distinction
between the two forms of iron. The iron will be in one of two oxidation
states: ferrous having a +2 charge, or ferric having a +3 charge.
Ferrous iron, the preferred iron form and is soluble in water at any pH.
Ferric iron, however, is only soluble below a pH of around 5.5; but if
the pH is higher than 5.5, which more than likely it will be in a
planted aquarium, the ferric iron will become insoluble and precipitate,
settling in the root zone. Once this occurs, foliar absorbtion becomes
impossible.
To overcome this precipitation, competing products
employ a chelate of ferric iron: iron-EDTA. While this does keep it
soluble, it has a couple of drawbacks with respect to foliar uptake of
iron. (1) Iron-EDTA bonding is very strong, thus very little of the iron
will be available to the plants over a given time frame and (2)
Physiological energy must be expended by the plant in order to extract
the ferric iron from EDTA-iron and then convert (reduce) it to the
ferrous form. Our approach is different in that we use a complex (not
chelate) of ferrous iron in Flourish Iron.
Size: 500 mL