Board index Β» Plants Β» Lawn Care Forum. Posted: Thu Jun 17, am. I'm new to organics and this forum. Hope I'm in the right spot. I recently tried to apply greensand, lava sand and dry molasses with a Scotts brand drop spreader I used in my synthetic days. I ran a test strip and found I was dropping about 4 Oz. After applying about 1 pound the slots in the spreader became clogged and had to be cleaned out only to become clogged again.
I also tried a small hand held broadcast spreader set wide open and it clogged after about two cranks of the handle. This happened with all three products. I'm in Corpus Christi so we always have a lot of humidity but the bags were new and went straight into the spreader after opening. Do I need a different spreader? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Posted: Mon Jun 21, am.
Hi Gmark and welcome to the forum. I have no good news for you. I'm in San Antonio and it is always too humid here to use a standard drop type spreader. Corpus is much more humid. The organic products, especially dry molasses, absorb humidity very quickly and form clumps in the hopper. Those clumps do not want to fall down into the spreader. My solution was to bounce the spreader along. That worked but my bottom-of-the-line Scott's spreader lasted one season and broke from being bounced around too much.
On a visit to an equipment rental business for something else, I looked at their fertilizer spreaders. Even their heavy duty spreaders looked like the same thing would happen. What I do is fling the materials out by hand, but 7, feet would be seven times more than I do.
Did you try spreading any fertilizer with your spreader? I'm guessing it will clog, too. Posted: Mon Jun 21, pm. I've tried drop and broadcast style spreaders and neither work well with greensand, lava sand, dry molasses. As with Dchall, I spread those products by hand. You might consider breaking up the application into several steps. Don't know if you have a small lawn tractor, but maybe one of those pull behind spreaders would work though I don't know this from experience.
