Negate chlorinated water damage?

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sixfoot Frisco, TX Apr 09, 2008

My dog likes to attack our pool sweep and successfullt did so this weekend. He pulled it out of the water and it flooded one of our beds with over 10 gallons of chlorinated pool water. Any ideas what kind of damage this may cause to my existing plants? Any way to safely chemically negate the effects of the chlorine?

Thanks for your help.

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ecrane3 Dublin, CA(Zone 9a) Apr 09, 2008

Are you seeing any damage yet? Honestly with only 10 gallons I imagine you'll be OK unless you have plants that are really sensitive (watering your garden all the time with pool water is not a great idea, but a one time thing probably won't do too much harm)

With the chlorine, whatever damage is going to be done is already done. It reacts very quickly with organic material (like soil) so it's already broken down (and unless your pool was very over-chlorinated I suspect a one time thing like this probably won't hurt things too much.) There are probably some other salts and things that came along with it (from the stuff you use to keep the pH in the right range, combined with the salts that form as the chlorine material reacts with stuff in your pool to keep it clean) and those will stick around longer than the chlorine will. I'm not sure if there would be enough there to be a problem or not.

You might hose off the leaves of any plants that got splashed to get salts, etc off of them, and if the soil isn't too wet then you could water it to dilute things out a bit, but if the soil's still really wet from the water that got dumped in it then I wouldn't risk overwatering, but next time the soil dries out a bit I'd give it a nice thorough watering to help flush out any salts that might be in there.

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sixfoot Frisco, TX Apr 09, 2008

Wow, thanks for the info. I *think* I am seeing some damage on one of the plants - a freshly planted traveler's palm seedling. Its leaves are kinda metallically looking. But my biggest concern is my beautiful japanese maple, which seems to be ok so far.

I did exactly what you suggested (so I guess I have some good plant instincts) and plan to water more in a couple of days when it is really dried up.

Thanks again for the great info.

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ecrane3 Dublin, CA(Zone 9a) Apr 09, 2008

Young seedlings or things that were just planted or under stress would be the ones mostly likely to have some sort of problems. And there's really not much you can do besides flush the soil with water, but you need to balance out the risk of overwatering since that'll damage things for sure! So sounds like you're doing exactly what I would do if that happened to me.

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