Two Things Everyone Should Know Before Buying Fertilizer

It’s dizzying, downright mindboggling.

Walk into your favorite garden center, or the garden department of a big box home center to buy fertilizer for your grass, and you may be overwhelmed by the choices offered.

There are fertilizers for different types of grass, and combination products for every situation imaginable. There is Weed and Feed, Seed and Sod, Gloom and Doom, and Fur and Feather fertilizers.  And I think I saw one that was strictly for applying on Wednesdays.

To avoid all of this confusion, you need two key pieces of information:

1. The type of grass you possess, and

2.The number of square feet in your lawn.

If you don’t know, or aren’t sure what type of grass you have, dig up a little clump from an inconspicuous place and take it somewhere for identification. An independent Garden Center would be my first choice. The local County Extension Agent would be the next best bet. You could also send a picture of it to me and I could try to identify it for you, but the photo needs to be crystal clear.  If your turf is less than 50% of any desirable grass, it is time to start over, but that’s a blog post for a different day.

Once you know what type of grass you have, you need to know how much of it you have. Using a measuring wheel or long tape measure, take measurements of your turf grass areas. Do not ‘step it off’. Not only does everyone have a different length gait, but no one can consistently walk the same all of the time. (I’ve tried this when I forgot to bring my measuring wheel.  It was a disaster.)  Knowing your turf area in square feet is basic information necessary in figuring how much fertilizer, lime, and weed control products you need to buy and apply. The beautiful part of this is once you determine the square footage of your turf area; you don’t need to do it again, unless you make major changes to your landscape.

To get started, get a note pad, pen, measuring device, and a calculator. A measuring wheel is my favorite measuring device because it’s fast and I’m able to use it without a helper. The Big Box stores sell wheels for around $65-$70, but you can rent one from most rental stores for a mere pittance.   If you use a tape, get at least a 50’ and get a helper to hold the ‘Alabama’ end. (Sorry, it’s a surveyor joke.) Make the helper feel important by getting them to write down the measurements as you call them out.

This process uses some very basic 5^th grade geometry. Remember that area is determined by measuring the length and the width, then multiplying them together. Simple, right? Visualize your lawn area as a collection of geometric shapes, usually rectangles and squares. For each ‘shape’ measure the length and width, then write it down to look like a math problem.  When you are finished you should have a column of math problems that look like this (for example):

24 X 18

56 X 32

16 X 19

12 X 5

…and so on until you have measured your entire lawn area.

Sit down with your calculator and do the math for each problem, then add together the totals to arrive at the square footage of your turf area.

Please note that it is not necessary to get EXACT measurements of every last blade of grass.  You can be ‘out’ by 10% and still be fine with applying fertilizer or other lawn care products.  Also, because few lawns are laid out in perfect geometric shapes, you’ll have to measure odd-shaped areas as if they were squares or rectangles. Oh, and sometimes it’s necessary to measure an area as a triangle.  The area of a triangle is determined by multiplying half the base length times the height.  For more detailed information, I suggest you Google this concept. It isn’t that difficult, just tedious to explain, and I’m about to put myself to sleep.

Let’s see, now:

Turfgrass identified? Check!

Lawn area measured and calculated? Check!

The worst mistake you can make is to guess at the above two tidbits of information while you are standing next to a stack of fertilizer at the store.  And now that you have the two most critical bits of information, you have the information you need to make intelligent purchase of lawn care fertilizer and chemicals.