Six years after Brevard County commissioners first balked at restricting fertilizer applications on lawns during the rainy summers, it’s now a yearly event and all the cities have joined in the effort.
“Yes, it was pretty rough in the beginning (in 2012) to get this passed,” county Natural Resources Director Virginia Barker recalled last week. “But then we had the algae superbloom and the major fish kills.”
The current fertilizer restriction started June 1, and will continue in effect until Sept. 30, in the county and cities.
Residents are restricted from using fertilizers with phosphorous and nitrogen in the meantime, but potassium can be part of the mix, said Sally Scalera, the urban horticulture agent with Brevard County’s branch of the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.
Scalera said nitrogen and phosphorous, two components of standard fertilizer, dissolve into the groundwater after lawn applications. Then summer rains carry them into the nearest water body, where they can nourish the algae into massive blooms, blocking sunlight from sea grass and decreasing the oxygen for fish and other creatures.
The county ordinance further bars any fertilizer from being applied within 15 feet from any surface water or wetland. And that’s throughout the county, Scalera said, not just along the Indian River Lagoon.
“In Brevard County, you’re either within drainage of the Indian River Lagoon or the St. Johns River, which are both impaired,” she said.
City ordinances follow the county law, which itself was based on a model prepared by the state. But there are a few differences in how far one needs to keep fertilizer from water.
Satellite Beach and Indian Harbor Beach bar fertilizers within 10 feet of a water body. Indialantic has a 25-foot fertilizer-free zone from water.
And Melbourne Beach mandates a 15-foot no-fertilizer zone plus a voluntary 25-foot “low maintenance zone,” which is planted and managed to reduce any need for such care as fertilizers, watering or mowing.
The county ordinance points to fines of up to $500 for violations. But Barker said her department has never cited or fined anyone for putting down the wrong kind of fertilizer, or using it where barred.
“Unless someone reports a violation, we don’t go out enforcing it,” she said. “We have gotten calls over the years. But we want to educate people, not fine them. And the intent is that nobody wants to pollute the lagoon, but most people don’t know any better.”
Cities take the similar approach of educating toward compliance instead of ordering violators in front of code-enforcement boards.
In Satellite Beach, people seen fertilizing in the wrong area will get a visit from its environmental programs coordinator, Nick Sanzone. But he comes with literature, not a pad of citation forms.
“We prefer to educate, as much as possible,” he said.
It’s hard to know, however, whether the government officials are reaching everyone they need to reach regarding proper fertilizer use, Scalera said.
For one thing, she said, nobody is there in the Home Depot or Lowe’s outdoor centers to counsel sales people on what they can sell in the summer or customers on what to safely use.
“The stores can still sell it,” she said, referring to the nitrogen- and phosphorous-laden fertilizer.
Barker has an idea, however, that she said might work. As part of a new set of lagoon-cleanup projects, she said, she wants to provide brochures in the big-box stores’ garden centers. That would offer the education right at the point of sale, she said.
