Why fertilize your lawn?
We hear this question a lot. It would be nice if we could fertilize our lawns once and be done with it, just like it would be nice if we could mow once for the season and that would be it. In the real world, where your lawn provides a growing, natural setting for your home and a place for your family to relax and play, it needs a regularly scheduled fertilization program to reach its full potential.
Grass that receives appropriate levels of fertilizer— not too little and not too much— produces a dense root and blade system that not only looks good, but also is better at filtering out impurities or other components that might be found in runoff.
Lawns require a balanced blend
Your lawn needs a balanced fertilizer program with nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium to keep it healthy and strong. Most soils have some of these elements present, but usually they become depleted over the years. Turf is a very hungry plant during the growing season.
In all of our fertilizer applications we also include a balanced blend of special micro-nutrients that research has found are essential for proper turfgrass development.
Proper fertilizing with balanced applications throughout the growing season promotes thick, dense grass that can resist disease and weed invasions. Applying too much of any one of the basic elements can cause erratic results. For example, an over abundance of nitrogen will cause rapid growth of the grass plants that the roots can't adequately handle; the blades become long and spindly. Balance is the key.
Organic vs Synthetic Lawn Fertilizers
More people are asking for information regarding organic lawn care. Most want to decrease or eliminate the use of synthetic fertilizers. The most common reason is their concern that so-called synthetic lawn products may be harmful to humans, beneficial insects, wildlife, and pets.
Fertilizers are really just basic building blocks of our environment. However, we've come to identify these basic building blocks as either inorganic (synthetic) or organic.
Inorganic fertilizers have been traditionally used in lawncare. More correctly, inorganic fertilizers are better described as soluble fertilizers. This means all they need is water to be available for plant absorption.
Organic fertilizers have the same basic chemical make up as inorganic's, except for this one important thing: they have not been processed to the degree that soluble fertilizers have been processed. For these organic fertilizers to be useful, they need to go through an additional step before providing any benefit to plants. That additional step is performed by microbes living in the soil.
Microbes ingest the organic fertilizer (usually in the form of some type of protein) process it and excrete it as soluble nutrients that can then be absorbed by the plants. Voila! Almost instant fertilizer. Well, not quite instant. Ever see how small a microbe is? That's one reason why organic fertilizers take longer for results to show up in the lawn. It also means that results can be spotty. It's very difficult to determine the number of microbes that exist in one lawn to the next. Some lawns may have an abundance of microbes and another lawn for whatever reason, may have substantially fewer microbes.
Inorganic fertilizers take the guesswork out of providing the right balance of nutrients to the soil. They are scientifically created to release a predetermined amount of the proper nutrients over a specific period of time.
The results: your turf grass gets exactly the right nutrients at the right time.
