It’s been just over 3 weeks since I overseeded my lawn. Last week I put down some fertilizer to give my lawn about .25lb of Nitrogen per 1,000 sqft. This week I repeated that amount. Any fast release fertilizer can be used for this. You can tell if you are using fast release fertilizer by reading the info on the back of the bag. I used some left over fertilizer that I bought at Home Depot (Lesco 24-0-11).
Looking at the NPK ratio for this fertilizer, in every pound of product there is 24% Nitrogen. Therefore, I put down just over 1lb. of fertilizer per 1,000 sqft, 1.1lbs to be exact. That gave me the .26lb of Nitrogen that I was looking for. This is also referred to as “spoon-feeding”, giving the grass small amounts of fertilizer more often. It’s the best way to feed the grass, however, we don’t all have the time to be fertilizing every week. The reason I did it this way was because I had just overseeded.
In 2 weeks, and going forward until the first frost date, I will apply fertilizer every 2 weeks, at a rate that will give the grass .50lb of Nitrogen per 1,000 sqft. If you don’t want to fertilize every 2 weeks, it can also be done once a month, in which case you’d be aiming to put down 1lb. of Nitrogen per 1,000 sqft. The recommended best practice is to feed your lawn no more than 1lb. of Nitrogen per month or a total of 4-5 lbs. of Nitrogen per season. Any more than this amount will likely get wasted as the grass can only take up so much Nitrogen. Left over Nitrogen on the soil can vaporize due to it being exposed to the air with no rain or irrigation. After applying any product to the lawn, always remember to sweep or use a blower to clean your walkways, driveways and sidewalks. This will help with preventing product runoff into our waterways when it rains.
On my next post I’ll go over the best way to fertilize your grass in the Fall, which if you’ve been following along, you already know some of it.
