Your lawn is a living and growing green oasis made up of thousands of individual plants. Our soils support the life or death of those plants and so it’s important that soil has everything the lawn could need to survive. Without fertilising, the lawn loses colour, becomes thin, gets patchy and dies off.
Choose the right fertiliser for you and your lawn
For unhealthy or unloved lawns needing a boost, Lawn Play Renovate is exactly what you need to get the job done. With added wetting agent it will help restore your lawn.
For healthy lawns requiring maintenance fertiliser, Lawn Play All Rounder is the right product for you. It will keep your lawn moving along with controlled release nutrition as well as beneficial microbes to help make the most of any locked-up nutrition already in your soil.
The Lawnganics liquid range of fertiliser provide a great option for improving and growing your lawn organically.
What you will need
Application doesn’t require much at all. For granular fertiliser products you will require a good quality spreader and for liquid fertilisers you will need a professional quality sprayer. While granulars can be spread by hand this unfortunately often leads to patchy and/or over application.
How to fertilise your lawn with a granular lawn fertiliser
We have a full in-depth guide here and even a how to video , but let’s cover the basics.
- Measure your lawn
- Choose an application rate
- Calculate your product
- Apply
- Water in
How to fertilise your lawn with liquid lawn fertiliser
We have a full in depth guide here and even a how to video , but let’s cover the basics.
- Measure your lawn
- Calculate your product and water required
- Apply the product
- Water in (if required, check the label)
When to fertilise the lawn
Fertilising at different times of the year can have different effects, primarily because the soil temperature is different, so the plant is doing different things.
Spring is the most common time for fertilising. Applying lawn fertiliser at this time is a great way to get your warm-season lawn, like Buffalo, Couch and Kikuyu, to grow sideways. At this time, the plant’s focus is on new growth, spreading to increase its size. So, tease up those bare patches, fertilise your lawn and keep the water up to watch them spread and fill any unwanted gaps.
Summer is often the forgotten period of lawn fertilising. It’s important that the grass isn’t missing any of the key elements required as it’s under quite a bit of heat stress. Generally, at this time of year you may be experiencing lots of growth and need some help with mowing, check out our blog on growth regulators.
Autumn is another key opportunity for lawn fertilising as this increases the lawn’s health in 2 ways. It forces the lawn to continue growing for longer, allowing it to enter winter in a denser state, a key component to preventing those winter weeds. Secondly, as the plant starts to cool, it starts to store these nutritional elements in some of its growing parts (stolons and rhizomes). This allows it to respond better as soil temperatures warm up in Spring.
When to fertilise new lawns
New lawns are a little different to existing lawns, after all they literally have no roots. New lawns need a bit of fertiliser underneath to kick start new growth and we recommend Lawn Play Underlay for just that.
As the new lawn grows we need to be careful not to rush them. It’s tempting to dump lots of fertiliser on them to get them looking magnificent and getting that first cut in but that’s not the best idea. The reasons being:
- New lawns don’t have the roots to support a mower moving across the top, the movement shears these roots off and they need to start again
- A boost of new growth is soft and susceptible to disease, the lawn has just been cut rolled and transported before being rolled again. This shock plus added soft leaf growth makes in target #1 for diseases.
So, when to fertilise new lawn?
It’s best to apply Lawn Play Underlay under the turf before laying and then follow it up 10 weeks later with a slow-release fertiliser like Lawn Play All Rounder.
Our Lawn Genius Tips
- Granular fertilisers are taken up as salts in the soil’s water so keep the soil nice and moist.
- Wetting agents like Lawn Play Aquaturf help with the even distribution of water and so fertiliser
- When foliar feeding, use a little blue dye in your first applications while you’re learning
- The addition of a surfactant like Wet Out helps foliar absorption of fertilisers (and can be used for herbicides too)
If you’re looking for fantastic advice on any aspect of lawn care then you should follow along on our YouTube channel, LawnFlix where our resident Lawn Genius shows you how to apply, how to calculate and just generally everything lawn related.
Thanks for reading this blog, if you have any questions feel free to reach out to us. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for well-timed lawn advice, because timing is very important in getting the best results for your lawn.
