Fertilizer Questions and Answers

As you may have discovered to your disappointment, healthy lawns and gardens require more than just soil, water, and sun. Like so many other living organisms, plants and grasses need to receive the right nutrients in the right balance to sustain their growth and life. Fertilizers can fulfill this critical requirement.

If you plan to fertilize your outdoor landscape, you’ll want to understand some important facts about how fertilizers work, what kinds of fertilizer make the most sense for your needs, and how you should proceed with your fertilizer applications. Nurture your knowledge with the following fertilizer questions and answers.

What Nutrients Go Into Fertilizer?
Plants can get most of the chemical elements they need directly from the surrounding soil, relying on water and air for the remainder. However, grasses, flowering plants, and crops can use these elements up, calling for supplementation with fertilizers. The three most critical elements in most fertilizers include nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.

Although many people use manure and other natural substances for fertilizer, commercial fertilizer products offer more precise control over the nutrient balances you feed your landscape. These products express their nutrient ratios as a set of three numbers. The first number indicates nitrogen, the second phosphorus, and the third potassium.

How Do Lawn Fertilizers Differ From Garden Fertilizers?
Lawns can have slightly different nutritional needs than garden plants. Both grasses and plants benefit from plenty of potassium and phosphorus. Nitrogen also helps both kinds of vegetation grow healthy leaves. However, too much nitrogen can keep garden plants from blooming, an issue you don’t have to worry about with grass.

Fertilizers for garden use typically take the form of granules that you simply push into the topsoil and then moisturize. Lawn fertilizers often come in a sprayable liquid form to cover large areas, although you may see them in granule form as well. Like granules, liquids need water for activation.

When Should You Schedule Fertilizer Applications?
The schedule you choose for fertilizer applications will depend in part on what part of your landscape you need to fertilize. For instance, while many garden plants respond well to fertilization during their growing period in the spring, lawns can suffer from shallow root growth if you fertilize them in the spring instead of the fall.

Other factors that might affect your schedule range from the mineral content in the soil to the specific types of plants in your garden. Hardy perennials may need no more than one application of fertilizer per year, while houseplants may need multiple applications and shrubs may barely need any fertilizer at all.

Why Should You Leave Fertilizer Application to Professionals?
Some fertilizers don’t make the safest substances to leave lying around your home because they can have toxic effects on children and pets. Even when you store and handle them carefully, a slight miscalculation in the amount you apply, or how little water you add, might do more long-term harm than good.

You might feel the urge to fertilize your lawn or garden as soon as you see yellow grass, brown leaves, or other trouble signs. However, these issues could easily stem from a disease, causing you to add fertilizer unnecessarily and to no avail. Professional landscapers know how to identify and treat these problems separately.

If your lawn could use some nourishment, turn to the landscaping professionals at Dirt &Turf. Our team can provide you with a professional fertilizer plan to help you keep your plants and grass healthy all year round. We also use fertilizers that won’t harm your pets or kids. Contact us today for a free estimate.