Plants need to eat just like people do, which is why you apply fertilizer every few months. That is the beginning and end of most people’s understanding of lawn fertilization.
In truth, fertilization is a complex process that is highly dependent on variables like water, sunlight, temperature, soil composition and grass variety. There are dozens of types of fertilizer for different types of plants, different climates and different seasons. Plus, it’s not just a matter of tossing a few handfuls of fertilizer over a lawn; fertilizer needs to be evenly distributed to have a positive impact.
If you know less about lawn fertilization than you thought you did, keep reading to learn how you can be better at keeping your lawn healthy and green – or just hire lawn fertilization experts to do the job for you.
What Fertilizer Is
To survive, your body needs nutrients like calcium, zinc, iron and magnesium, which you can get through your food. Plants need almost identical nutrients to humans, but in different proportions and different forms. In nature, plants receive nutrients through the circle of life: Decaying animal and plant matter sinks into the soil and gets processed by insects, fungi, bacteria and other organisms, and the broken-down nutrients are sucked into plants through their roots.
However, in your yard, there isn’t any decaying plant and animal matter, so any nutrients originally in your soil were likely used up by your plants long ago or else drained away with water and wind. That’s where fertilizer comes in: to add back the nutrients your plants – specifically, your lawn – needs to survive. Grass fertilizer is made of three main components, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, as well as some micronutrients like boron, cobalt, copper, manganese and molybdenum.
Why Fertilizer Matters
The macronutrients of potassium, nitrogen and phosphorus help your grass perform vital functions that keep it alive. For example, every amino acid – the building blocks of DNA – contains nitrogen. Thus, your lawn cannot replicate cells, i.e. grow, without nitrogen in the soil. Additionally, critical components of cells contain phosphorus, which provides them energy and facilitates in the transfer of nutrients from one cell to another. Finally, potassium is essential to metabolizing light and water, and it makes up between 1 and 2 percent of any plant.
Considering these uses of macronutrients found in fertilizer, it should be obvious why your lawn needs regular fertilization. It won’t be able to take in other abundant nutrients, like water or sunlight, without them; it won’t be able to grow lush and green; and it won’t be able to fight off diseases and pests as effectively. Thus, you need to invest time and energy into fertilizing properly.
How to Fertilize Properly
Lawn fertilization isn’t easy, but it isn’t difficult, either. Most residential lawns – i.e. those grown for aesthetics and mild use – require a minimal amount of fertilization, but if you want to be certain that nutrients are added properly, you can always hire professionals to do this job for you.
You should be fertilizing your lawn at least twice per year: once in the late spring and once in the late fall. Each of these feedings performs a different purpose. In spring, you are trying to help your lawn grow anew after the cold, dry winter, so you need a fertilizer with the nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium ratio of 1-2-2. In the fall, you are trying to stimulate root growth, so the lawn will survive hibernation; that means you need a ratio of 3-1-2. Getting these ratios right is the most important step to successful fertilization.
Then, you need to be careful how you administer the fertilizer. While some homeowners are perfectly happy throwing handfuls around their lawns, this doesn’t distribute the fertilizer evenly, which means you could end up with healthy, green patches, hungry patches and burned, dead patches. After all, too much fertilizer is as dangerous as not enough. Thus, you should rent or purchase a drop spreader, which spreads the fertilizer in a perfectly even spray, reaching all parts of your lawn in a trip or two.
Fertilizer isn’t a lawn chore you can conscionably ignore. Your lawn could be starving to death, and you wouldn’t know it until too late. You should keep a fertilization schedule – or else outsource the responsibility to trustworthy pros who truly understand lawn fertilization.