Is your lawn nice and green? I’m going to show you what fertilizer is and how to use it correctly.
First, you have to know when to fertilize. You don’t want to fertilize in winter. Wait until spring when the ground is warmed up and then periodically fertilize during the warm months and summer based on the labels recommendations for your type of grass. Now this is what I call a golden lawn, only I want a nice green lawn. This one has actually stopped growing, it has lost all its color, it’s definitely in need of fertilizer. Now, I want to show you what to use so that we don’t do more damage than good.
I’m going to put on my gloves here because when you’re working with fertilizers, you’re working with chemicals. There are a lot of fertilizers out there in the market, but most of them, what you see are these pellets or granular form fertilizer. This is a balanced fertilizer. There are three numbers on fertilizers that, left to right, represent percentages of nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. Generally, nitrogen helps green up vegetation and promotes growth. Phosphorus helps build a strong root system, and potassium helps keep your plants strong.
Here is the secret, lawn needs nitrogen fertilizer. Ammonium sulfate is a fertilizer that’s full of nitrogen, so that’s what I’m going to give this lawn. It’s fast acting and it’s going to green up right away. But unless I do something else, it’s going to start to lose that green and it’ll be looking just like it is right now. So when I’m done applying the nitrogen fertilizer, I’m going to come right behind it with this 15-15-15, the balanced fertilizer. High nitrogen and balanced fertilizer, one to green it up and one to keep it green.
Now there are a couple of choices here. I can always use a drop spreader. And a drop spreader has this little bin on top of it. And on the inside, my fertilizer gets distributed in a perfect line just dropping right beneath the spreader. One thing I don’t like about this is if you don’t get your lines just right, you’re going to have stripes, green and blonde stripes in this case. So what I’m going to use instead is just a small broadcast fertilizer here. It’s got a trigger here on the side. This trigger controls a little flap door here and that numbers allow that door to open more or less, so I got it on the middle setting and I only want that door to open up about halfway. It’s very important. Before you spread the fertilizer, make sure that you wet the soil beforehand. When you’re done fertilizing, you can water that fertilizer in. You want to be careful when you’re applying fertilizing and especially high nitrogen fertilizer, too much nitrogen can actually burn the grass.
So always check the bag’s instructions on how much to add. Once you’re all done with that, water it in and we’re fertilized.
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