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• October 13, 2022

A Well Rounded Diet 🥗

If you have ever looked into starting a new workout plan, you’ve certainly looked into combining that with a healthy diet. Your body is like a vehicle with an engine, it needs good quality fuel and enough of it in order to run. That means you need to fuel your body by eating the right foods and drinking the right fluids. You also need to make sure to drink and eat the correct things at the correct times.

As with our theme, your lawn draws many similarities when it comes to the types of food it receives, the timing in which it receives it and the amount it needs to receive. All of these things are crucial to having a robust, healthy lawn.

The Food 🍔

Imagine completely ignoring your body, and the signals that it sends you. You drive by a McDonalds and order all the fast food you desire and eat it. That evening your stomach tells you that was a mistake. The next day at lunch you drive by Taco Bell, that trips your trigger, so you drive through and order 4 soft shell tacos, fried potatoes and a pop. Once again, your stomach begins to deeply regret this.

You decide that the taste is worth the consequences that you are experiencing later on. You do this day after day, week after week. Two years go by, you wake up one day and stand in front of the mirror. What do you think you would see? Now, you could help fight off or cancel out some of the consequences of eating like this by combining it with a regular workout, but under the surface, your body is not operating at its full potential, regardless of your appearance.

Your lawn is alive, growing and changing. It depends on the nutrients coming from the ground in order to thrive and survive. The ground is a storage unit for all of the nutrients that get thrown onto it, and it soaks it up and holds onto it. It then will release and do its best to reproduce those nutrients into the plants that it supports. Your grass is that plant. The health and appearance of your grass, is a direct representation of the health of your dirt. Your dirt cannot output nutrients that it isn’t being fed. If you don’t take anything else away from this blog, take away this one thing….

healthy dirt = healthy lawn – unhealthy dirt = unhealthy lawn

When it comes to the type of food you feed your lawn, it’s much like the food you eat in order to stay healthy. There are numerous types of health programs you can setup for your lawn to get it the nutrients it needs. There are many different types of fertilizers out there, with any number of combinations and types of nutrients that they contain. Let’s just review the basics.

As we discussed in a previous blog, your lawn needs the 3 main nutrients of Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium.

Nitrogen will help your lawn grow and help it retain its green color.

Phosphorus will encourage root growth.

Potassium will help your lawn’s all around health.

Just like all of the diet plans you can go on, the nutrients and types of food to use on your lawn can get very complicated as there are so many options. However, if you focus on those three main nutrients and make sure your lawn isn’t insufficient in any of them, you are well on your way to a healthy lawn. If you have no idea what your lawn needs, try performing a soil test. Take small samples of dirt around lawn and send them into a lab that will send you back the results so you can visually see and know what nutrients your lawn is lacking or strong in. If you need a soil test, we at Warren Lawn would love to help you out with that.

The Timing ⌚️

Timing plays a big role in your lawn. In Iowa, we get the full effect of all 4 seasons. Understanding how your lawn behaves through these seasons, is what will guide you to know when to feed your lawn. Let’s look at a basic framework of one way to look at timing when feeding your lawn.

The year begins with Winter and as it fades away and the Spring warms up the ground, your lawn will begin to wake up from its Winter dormancy. March through April is a great time to give your lawn the first fertilizer containing a sufficient rate of Nitrogen. This will help push your lawn to grow as much as possible to get ready for the hot Summer. Later in the Spring, you can apply another fertilizer of similar quality in nutrients. Now is a great time to combine those fertilizers with a pre-emergent. Just like the grass, the weed seeds are waking up and growing as well and now is a great time to get ahead of them and stop them with a pre-emergent. Have no idea what pre-emergent is? Check out our blog all about pre-emergent here.

When the Summer arrives and rain isn’t as abundant, you want to back off on the Nitrogen in your fertilizer. Pushing your cool season lawn to grow in the Summer when it doesn’t want to will only stress it out. Now is the time to apply fertilizers to your lawn that contain micronutrients like sulfur, manganese, iron, etc. Much like a well rounded diet that contains all the vitamins your body needs, your lawn will benefit greatly by receiving those same micronutrients. As the Summer winds down and temperatures begin to fall, you want to apply a fertilizer with a higher rate of Potassium in order to help some root development and all around health. This will help it prepare for the Winter. If you would like to feed your lawn one last time before the Winter, apply a winterizer fertilizer containing only Nitrogen right before the snow flies, a fertilizer that is pure urea. This fertilizer will kick into action when the Spring comes and your lawn thaws out.

Whew, that is a lot of information, and it really only scrapes the surface of the types of food your lawn need and when it needs it. While we covered the basics, we haven’t provided you with an exhaustive list of information by any means. Feeding your lawn can be a daunting task, so if you need any help or have questions along your journey don’t hesitate to reach out to us at Warren Lawn. Our professionals would be happy to answer any questions you have. We want to see you enjoy the success of a thick, green, healthy lawn.