Lawn Care and Fertilizing
Lawn care and fertilizing are inseparable. You can not think about lawn care without fertilizing. If you want your lawn to look healthy and green, it is essential that you keep in mind fertilizing. Fertilizing is perhaps the single most important factor that affects your lawn care and even though it is not the only one factor it is still one of the most important factors. It provides color and growth to your lawn grass and also helps it to grow thick. Let’s take a look at some of the essential features of fertilizing and the correct way to administer it.
To start your education, we start with the main ingredients of fertilizer: nitrogen, phosphate and potash. Obviously, if fertilizer contains these three ingredients, they must have some specific functions. You need balanced diet to remain healthy and the same applies to your lawn also. Fertilizing would involve the administration of all these constituents but in different amounts. Your lawn would need nitrogen in the maximum amount as it helps in fast growth, gives it dark color and also thickens the grass. But what would happen if you just go on giving lots of nitrogen and not enough phosphate and potash? The direct result would be too much top growth and in addition to that it would also mean less than sufficient root growth and less than desired capacity for recovery.
So, you need to have a balanced fertilizing program-a fertilizing program which would include all the three ingredients in the proper amount and also micro-nutrients. You should understand that micro-nutrients are nothing but minerals like iron, manganese, boron, zinc etc and even though these are not needed that much, these still have their own place in grass growth. Your soil might have some of the micro-nutrients but you would have to provide those micro-nutrients that the soil is deficient in.
This translates into the fact that you would have to get a soil test done. And when you have received the results of the soil test, you should administer the suggested fertilizers that were recommended in the suggested amounts. More is not better where fertilizing is concerned. You might find very good top growth but that is deceptive. It won’t have the same effect on the root system and it might also cause ecological problems. Over fertilizing might contaminate nearby lakes or streams (runoff problem) and that might ultimately harm the entire ecosystem.
The best time of fertilizing is thirty days before the growing season. And you should go on fertilizing after every sixty days or so throughout the growing season. That would help your lawn grass to grow well. And it would also allow your grass to remain healthy and thick. That has a direct impact on the growth of weeds. The stronger your lawn grass is the more resistant it would be to weeds. Thus, fertilizing would also help your in fighting weeds.
To summarize, we have seen the results of fertilizing and some of the technical details of fertilizing.
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