Lawn Care For Dummies, Mini Edition by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley Publishing
Published: 2010-12-07T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

Fertilizing Your Lawn

In This Chapter

Understanding which nutrients your lawn needs

Figuring out how much fertilizer to apply

Knowing when and how often to fertilize

Applying fertilizers without polluting the environment

Think of your lawn as a densely populated city with crowded people rather than tightly packed grass plants. The more people you have in the city, the more food they need. If there isn’t enough food, people get sick, and some may even die. The population thins out, with only the toughest people holding on.

The same is true for your lawn — it’s a densely populated, competitive situation. If there isn’t enough food, the grass thins out, and tougher plants — usually weeds — take hold.

We all need to feed — or more precisely — fertilize our lawns. A well-fed lawn allows all the grasses to thrive and grow close together, keeping the lawn green and healthy looking and less susceptible to invading weeds.

But fertilizing lawns isn’t quite that simple. You have to use the right kind of fertilizer, apply it at the right time of year, and use the right amount. Do any of those steps improperly, and you may have more problems than if you didn’t fertilize at all.

So that’s what this chapter is about — how to fertilize your lawn to keep it healthy and happy.

Nitrogen Counts the Most

Grass, like other plants, requires 16 elements (or nutrients) for healthy growth. Some nutrients, like carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, come automatically. (Carbon and oxygen come from the atmosphere, and hydrogen comes from water.) Other nutrients are present either in the soil in adequate amounts or in fertilizers that you have to apply.

Of all the nutrients that grasses need, nitrogen is most important to sustain healthy growth. Nitrogen is also the nutrient you need to add in the largest amounts. Nitrogen keeps grass green and vigorous. If your lawn doesn’t get enough nitrogen, it turns pale and yellow, grows slowly, and starts to thin out. You can surely expect weeds. Nitrogen also easily leaches, or washes, through the soil (and out of the reach of roots) with irrigation water. With all those factors, you can see why nitrogen is the main player in the fertilizer game.

Before you have nitrogen tattooed among the grass growing on your chest, you need to know that you can get too much of this good thing. Applying too much nitrogen can burn the lawn like a blowtorch. If excessive nitrogen doesn’t burn your lawn, then it can cause excess, lush growth that diseases and insects love to devour, and you’ll need to mow every other day (ouch!). Finally, water runoff that’s filled with nitrogen can pollute groundwater, streams, and lakes, and we can’t have that.

So even though nitrogen is the most important nutrient your lawn needs, you have to apply it thoughtfully and at appropriate times.

Lawn fertilizers contain two forms of nitrogen:

Quick-release forms of nitrogen, such as ammonium nitrate, ammonium sulfate, ammonium phosphate, and urea, are immediately available to the plant.

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