With spring well underway, it’s time to give your lawn its first fertilizer of the year. Think of fertilizer as nutrition for your lawn. It’s actually amazing how much more attractive and healthier a lawn is when it’s fertilized adequately.
Here in this part of Massachusetts, most lawns need to be fertilized three times annually. The spring fertilization, which should be happening fairly soon, gives your lawn what it needs to start the growing season strong. The other two times to fertilize are mid-summer, to counter the brutal summer heat which saps nutrients from growing plants, and in the fall to prepare for the coming winter.
Is Fertilizing the Lawn a DIY Job?
In a lot of ways, fertilizing is like a beauty treatment at the salon. The more customized it is, the better the results are going to be. One of the advantages of working with a professional lawn care service is that they can custom mix fertilizer blends to address your lawn’s specific nutritional needs. This provides much better results than picking a product off the shelf at the local hardware store.
Additionally, the key to successfully applying fertilizer to the lawn is even application. When there’s too much fertilizer applied to one area of the lawn, grass can get burnt and die. When there’s not enough fertilizer, the grass withers due to lack of nutrition. The overall impact is uneven, patchy growth. When your local lawn service applies the fertilizer, the result is consistent over the entire lawn. This results in healthy green grass growth.
Applying Fertilizer to Compacted Soil
If the surface of your lawn is hard like concrete, it’s very difficult for fertilizer and rain water to penetrate to the grass roots underground. This stifles the grass’ ability to grow. You’ll know your soil is heavily compacted when you see water or fertilizer pooling on the surface or running off to disappear underground somewhere else.
In this situation, you’ll want to have your local lawn service aerate the soil in advance of fertilizer application. Aeration introduces thousands of tiny pencil-eraser sized holes into the surface of the lawn. This makes it easier for fertilizer and rainwater to penetrate and results in greater grass growth.
