growing a garden as a family

One of the joys of being a homeowner is the ability to have a beautiful lawn that you can customize. However, this joy can also be a hardship, because caring for the lawn is not cut and dry. Most people mow their lawn once or twice a week, but the bigger questions come when it is appropriate to use fertilizer on the lawn. There are no clear answers for how often or how much to fertilize, but there are some guidelines to make it easier to determine.

Types of Grass

The first step in determining when to fertilize, how much to fertilize, and how often to reapply it is to know a little about your lawn. You will need to know what type of grass you have (at least the majority of your lawn if you have different types of grass) and what type of fertilizer you are looking at using.

Bermuda grass is one of the most common types of grass found in lawns. Even though it tends to prefer warm seasons, it will grow throughout the year. It is also a grass type that requires a lot of maintenance. This grass, along with Centipede, St. Augustine, and Zoysia, will need to be fed roughly three pounds of nitrogen for every 1,000 square feet of lawn you have over the course of a year.

If you have bluegrass instead of Bermuda grass, you will want to only use one to two pounds of nitrogen for every 1,000 square feet of lawn over the course of a year. This is because cool-season grasses, like bluegrass, are dormant during the summer and are considered low maintenance.

You can purchase the fertilizer you need from professional companies like T And N Inc.

When to Fertilize

With that in mind, the type of fertilizer you use will determine how often you need to apply it. There are two main types of fertilizer, a high-nitrogen type that releases slowly and then a lower level fertilizer that is more all-purpose. If you are wanting a healthy lawn year round (since most types of grass are not green in the winter), then you want to apply a high-nitrogen every six months or an all-purpose fertilizer every six to eight weeks.

It is important to realize that grass grows year round, even though cool-weather grasses are more dormant during the summer. This means that the best time to fertilize cool-weather grasses is once (or twice if using an all-purpose fertilizer) during the spring and then once (or twice) during the fall. If you are wanting to only fertilize once a year, then select fall because you have cooler weather and the roots have a chance to really feast on the nitrogen. However, you want to make sure that you fertilize right before a rain so that you do not have to worry about watering the lawn.

Finally, always pay attention to the type of weather you have had over the summer. The summer heat and insects are extremely hard on grass, so you want to make sure that you give the soil the nutrients it needs to remain healthy.