Fertilizing Your Lawn
Enhance the color, density and vibrancy of your lawn with proper fertilization. While your lawn’s soil does supply your turf with nutrients, those nutrients cannot outlast the growing season so fertilizing is a must to give your lawn all the benefits it needs to flourish. Fertilizing your lawn will also help it build a level of density that will be extremely hard for weeds to penetrate. So the benefits of fertilizing your lawn regularly and properly can lead to other benefits such as saving you time digging up weeds and keeping your lawn looking its very best.
Here you will learn what fertilizer is and how to apply it to your lawn. For more information about lawns and fertilizing, contact the lawn experts at Sierra Sod.
What is Lawn Fertilizer
Lawn fertilizer is made up three chemicals: Nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. Nitrogen helps your grass grow green and vibrant while phosphorous enhances root development and potassium boosts your lawn’s drought and disease resistance.
How to Choose the Right Fertilizer
The chemical ratios can very in amount depending on your circumstances for fertilizing but there is an easy method to determine which bag of fertilizer is best for your lawn. By checking fertilizer bags or packaging you will find three numbers prominently listed. These numbers tell you how much of each chemical are in the bag. The first number is the amount of nitrogen, the second is phosphorous, and the last number represents potassium. To know how much of each is in the bag, multiply the percentage by the size (weight) of the bag. (Example: a 50 lb. bag of 10-10-10 contains 5 pounds each of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.) Be sure to read the fertilizer bag to ensure you’re using a suitable amount of each chemical for the needs of your lawn.
The example below shows some common fertilizer chemical combinations.
- General/All-Purpose Fertilizers: 10-10-10
- Starter Fertilizer: 20-27-5
- When to Fertilize a Lawn
The best time to fertilize your lawn is when the roots are growing. Here in Northern California, that can happen twice a year because we grow “Cool-Season Grasses” that tend to have two flourishing (or growing) periods. The first is after the lawn’s return from winter dormancy. The second is during the early fall, when temperatures moderate and droughts and heat waves typically are gone (after August). For areas around here such as Sacramento and San Francisco, apply a larger amount of nitrogen during the early fall growing period and a lesser amount in the spring.