Miracle-Gro LiquaFeed All Purpose Plant Food Universal Starter Kit, For Flowers, Vegetables, Trees and Shrubs, One 16 oz. Plant Food and One Universal Feeder

Nice little system to inject fertilizer into the water while watering your plants. It has a little pump built into the system, powered by the flow of water from the tap, so that the greater the flow of water, the faster the pump pumps. That means that no matter the flow rate, you get a consistent percentage of fertilizer added to the water. I have used the Miracle-Gro hose end mixer with the blue crystals, but the spray concentration is not uniform from beginning to end, starting out more concentrated and then getting weak at the end. It is also heavy and unwieldy and not well suited to watering individual containers.Using this Universal Feeder with a good water wand is much easier and effective. The only problem in my view was buying the little bottles of fertilizer to use with the system. It does not make sense to be shipping water around the country, when I have plenty of water available at my house. Also, the bottles are pretty small and run out in about fifteen minutes, so I needed to keep an eye on the fertilizer level to be sure that I still had some fertilizer left in the bottle. I also did not like the idea of only using a bottle once and then throwing it away. That seems wasteful to me.I dealt with these issues by adapting one of the little bottles so that I could mix up my own fertilizer and then add it to the bottle. I also expanded the capacity of the system by adding a gallon bottle to the little bottle. This way, I can mix up a batch of fertilizer a gallon at a time and water for an hour or more without worrying about running out of fertilizer. Mixing the blue crystals one to one with water produces a concentration that is identical to that found in the LiquaFeed bottles, since the crystals have exactly twice the N-P-K as the liquid in the bottles.I did this by gluing the cap from an empty gallon bottle to the bottom of a LiquaFeed bottle. Then I drilled a hole through the cap and the bottom of the LiquaFeed bottle so that the two bottles were interconnected. The bottom of the LiquaFeed bottle is thick tough plastic, so I you try my method, start with a small drill and work up to a larger drill size to get an appropriate size hole. See my photo of the cap for the size of hole that I ended p with.I also cut a flap in the bottom of the gallon bottle. This helps in two ways. First, it allows air into the bottle so the fertilizer flows freely and the large bottle does not collapse as the liquid is removed. It also gives me an access point so that I can use a funnel to fill up the bottle without having to remove the bottle from the feeder each time. The two bottles glued together is a bit top heavy, so I have used a bungee cord to support the bigger bottle against a fence. See the photo that shows the bungee cord holding the gallon bottle section upright.So far, it has been working great and my plants have really thrived by receiving all the fertilizer. I have been using it a lot more often than every two weeks but there is no sign of burning or over fertilization, so the Universal Feeder System must dilute the concentration of the fertilizer down enough so that you can use the system quite often. I am using the fertilizer about every other watering and since all I have to do is turn the selector switch, it makes it more likely that I will fertilize than if I had to remove and attach a bottle of LiquaFeed every time I wanted to fertilize my plants.Update 4/27/17: I have found that you can simply pry the top off of the little Miracle-Gro bottles and insert the top into a regular 2 liter soda bottle. I did that for a while, but the 2 liter soda bottle is thin and fragile and tends to collapse as the liquid is sucked out of the bottle. I found a sturdier bottle with the same neck size as the Miracle-Gro bottle and the 2 liter bottle. The neck size must be fairly standard. The one I found was a bottle in an Asian food store that held an aloe vera drink. As our British cousins would say, "Works a treat!" Please check out new photos to see how it works.

On time delivery. Easy to use

It's rare to see something designed this poorly. This product has three huge issues, both due to the fact that the bottle is mounted to one side. 1. It's mounted on the WRONG side. The unit tends to but counter-clockwise weight on the hose bib. This tends to LOOSEN its connection - which then leaks. 2. The side-mounted bottle turns the whole unit so it doesn't point straight up. The bottle should mount TO THE TOP of the unit, not offset to one side. If it HAS to be mounted to one side, for the love of god above, mount it on the RIGHT SIDE so the weight of the bottle tends to tighten the connector to the spigot, not LOOSEN it. 3. Upper management seems to have taken a lesson from the folks that make inkjet printers. (i.e. give the printer away, and massively overprice the cartridges.) The bottles of the fertilizer are VERY expensive for what you get (in my opinion). I used to see the bottles come in packs of 4, now it's packs of 2. Prices I see come to around $6 a bottle - are you kidding me.

The media could not be loaded. Worked great for half of last growing season and the first three or four weeks of this season before the ring that holds the pump assembly together split in half and soaked everything within a 15’ area. Thankfully I had the timer controlling the drip system set to water at 05:30 and I had come out back to let the dog out at 06:00 so the full flow of my water (in California where we have water meters and pay more than most areas of the USA for our water use) was spraying out for only half an hour! Had I not noticed it could have been running full blast until someone called the water company which would result in a fine for allowing water to run down the rain gutter in the street. Now, I figured that since the cost of this thing was less than $20 that I would just have to purchase a replacement pump, but I thought what the heck I will just give Miracle-Gro a call to see if perhaps they may have just the green plastic retaining ring available. What do ya know, not only did they have them in stock they are going to drop ship me the part for no charge! That was a nice surprise. So, while the product failed, they are going to make it right at no cost to me, which is darn near unheard of these days. So, three thumbs up from me for that.For those who may be for of the DYI kinda folks you should know it is quite simple to refill the feeder solution bottles with a home brew of your own making by simply prying off the proprietary cap and simply snapping it back on after filling the bottle with whatever kind of solution you would like to mix up for your growing needs. Thought I would mention that because at first, while I liked the injection pump hooked up to my drip irrigation for the garden I was not at all happy about need to purchase additional bottles of nutrient solution when they became empty. Wasteful and seemed like a “subscription” scam so prevalent these days for just about everything. Note, I still use mostly Miracle-Gro plant food so it isn’t like I am not giving the company my money for their product. I just do not like the idea of creating more plastic waste as these bottles of nutrient solution empty. That is environmentally disrespectful in my honest opinion.See pics of failure.