How to Get Rid of Moss in Lawns

Many homeowners trying to get rid of moss in the lawn fail to realize that moss plants are an indicator that you currently have less than ideal conditions for growing grass. So this weed is not the cause of your problems, but an effect.

The potential causes behind the problem are:

• Low soil pH
• Lack of necessary nutrients in the soil
• Poor drainage
• Excessive shade

Consequently, you have to understand that the job of getting rid of moss (permanently) has only just begun when you remove the particular patch of moss growing in your lawn at the present time.

You must follow up that initial removal with some investigative work, to determine why moss would grow in the area to begin with, in spite of your attempts to grow grass there you can find the professionals through landscaping near me. If you fail to discover which of the potential causes behind the problem applies to your own garden, a new patch of moss will simply take the place of the old one.

Firing the Initial Salvo

How do you get rid of the moss currently growing in the lawn? Well, since moss is shallow-rooted, you may be able simply to rake it out. But if you do need to apply an herbicide, take note that there are both chemical and organic options its best to contact with your local lawn care experts. Among the latter, baking soda is sometimes used, as well as soap (both Safer soap and the type of soap you use to wash dishes).

For example, some people recommend filling a garden sprayer with 2 gallons of lukewarm water and mixing in a box of baking soda for lawncare. Others mix dish soap (Dawn Ultra seems to be the preferred product) and water in a garden sprayer (2 to 4 ounces per gallon of water).

But, again, such efforts are only a first step. For long-lasting success, it is critical that you conduct an investigation into the root cause or causes of the problem.

How to Get Rid of Moss Permanently: Is the Root Cause in Your Soil?

A great way to begin your investigation is to send in a sample of your soil to your local Lawn Care Service Provider so that they can test it for you.

Tell them that you are trying to get rid of moss in a lawn and indicate that you need to find out what your soil pH is and whether or not your soil contains the necessary nutrients for growing a healthy lawn. This way, you can kill two birds with one stone: The root cause of your problem could be either (or both) of these soil-related issues.

As C.L. Fornari points out in Coffee for Roses, it is not that the presence of moss, in and of itself, is necessarily an indicator that your soil’s pH is overly acidic. The issue here is not that a more alkaline soil will kill the moss, but rather that your grass may need a more alkaline soil to compete effectively against moss. If this is the case, you will need to apply garden lime to “sweeten” the ground. If the ground lacks the nutrients required for lawns to be healthy, you will have to amend the soil and then fertilize the lawn on a regular basis (with compost if you wish to stay organic).

If the soil under your lawn does not drain very well and retains excessive moisture, this condition, too could invite moss. What is a good indicator that you have a drainage problem? Well, a type of soil with high clay content should send up a red flag.

Water tends to percolate slowly through overly clayey soils, and that can lead to puddling. Happily, there is a very simple test you can conduct to determine what type of soil you have. Of course, if you remember seeing standing water somewhere on your lawn after a spring rain, that is all the evidence that you need to conclude that you have drainage issues in that area. If clay is the source of your problem, amend the soil (for example, with humus) to make it more friable.

Poor drainage could be due to any of a number of factors (clay content in the soil is only one possible factor). If the lawn receives a lot of foot traffic (as when children play on the lawn frequently), your problem could be soil compaction, for which the recommended solution is Lawn Aeration. When you should aerate depends, in part, on the type of lawn grass you grow.

Aerate cool-season grasses in early fall and warm-season grasses in mid-spring to early summer.

Some homeowners intent on getting rid of moss really need to be focusing on getting rid of thatch. A thick layer of thatch can prevent water from penetrating properly through the soil. The process of removing thatch is called “dethatching.”

In some cases, poor drainage will have to be addressed by re-routing excess water. French drains are often installed for this purpose.

Or Is the Real Reason You Have Moss Excessive Shade?

Finally, getting rid of moss in a lawn can simply be a matter of addressing the issue of excessive shade. At least this problem, unlike the others discussed above, is intuitive: Even total landscaping novices understand the concept of “shade.” There are two angles from which to tackle the problem:

• Open up the area to more sunlight through tree removal (or at least have some of the larger branches pruned off).
• Grow a shade-tolerant grass.

Moss is opportunistic and will sometimes fill in lawn areas left bare because the grass variety that you have chosen is ill-suited to shady conditions. The solution to your problem of getting rid of moss may be as simple as switching grasses. Tall fescue grass is a relatively shade-tolerant grass.

Indeed, as with battling other types of weeds in the lawn, often the best defense is a good offense. Healthy grass will crowd out weeds. Instead of asking, “How do I get rid of moss?” the better question may be, “How can I make my lawn greener?”

How to Winterize Your Yard in Fall

Do you need some motivation to perform fall garden care? Well, just think of all the joy your planting beds provided you during the spring and summer. Don’t you want more of the same next year? Assuming you do, there are tasks you can undertake in autumn to help your landscape get off to a good start once the warm weather returns.

But there’s more than the garden to think about. There are a number of serious lawn care chores and related tasks for the landscaper to complete to winterize the yard in fall and ready the landscape for the next growing season.

Let’s take a brief look at some of the chores you should be performing in autumn, from Lawn Care Hastings NE to winterizing trees and shrubs and taking care of your equipment.

Essential Autumn Lawn Care

During autumn, don’t stop trying to improve the health of your grass for next year — or at least trying to maintain the status quo. For one thing, you’ll want to try to remove broadleaf weeds and thereby remove some competition for available nutrients and water. Along the same lines, have a soil test done to check, for example, on the soil pH of your lawn. If the test should show excessive acidity, apply lime immediately (its effects don’t kick in right away). If, on the contrary, your soil is too alkaline, apply sulphur or contact with your local Lawn Care Ayr NE.

Everybody knows that we should rake leaves in fall as part of the winterizing process for lawns, but many don’t know exactly why we rake leaves. But anyone who has ever raked them knows that it’s tedious work.

Some people choose to use leaf blowers, instead. Here’s another option: before putting your lawn mower to bed for another winter, fire it up (making sure the grass catcher is attached) and run over the leaves with it. Sort of like “vacuuming” the leaves off your lawn. When you’re done, be sure to provide the proper lawn mower care to winterize it.

Many people who have lawn problems do not realize how detrimental thatch build-up is to their grass. An advantage to raking leaves (as opposed to resorting to gadgetry) is that you can dethatch your lawn at the same time: a vigorous raking will extricate some of the thatch that may be plaguing your lawn. But for cases of severe soil compaction, you’ll probably have to use the technique known as core aeration.

Overseeing Lawns in the Fall

Then there’s the matter of overseeing. Consult the general guidelines offered in the following resources:

• Overseeing Lawns With Cool-Season Grasses
• Overseeing Lawns With Warm-Season Grasses

Note: You should already have applied fertilizer lightly to cool season grasses in late summer / early fall (the “bridge feeding”). Since these grasses are most active during periods of moderate weather (not too hot, not too cold), it is precisely at this time that they can best use the nutrients provided by a fertilizer. Fertilization promotes root growth and helps the lawn recover from the summer heat, while preparing it for the next growing season.

Such fertilizers are designed to help you winterize lawns.

Fall Garden Care: Winterizing Garden Beds and Vegetable Beds

After harvesting your fruits and flowers, fall Landscaping Ayr NE should ascend to the top of your agenda. Remove old plant matter from the garden, placing it in your compost bin. Leaving it behind in the garden would invite plant diseases next growing season.

Some people choose to rototill their garden soil at this time, although some experts say that excessive rototilling may do more harm than good. But some people rely on small garden tillers to keep down weeds in vegetable gardens. Rototilling in fall may seem premature; but it will make your spring gardening work go much easier. Drain the old gas out of the rototiller afterwards.

If you are going to rototill the garden, this is the time to apply lime (if soil tests have indicated that your pH is too low).

The effects of liming don’t manifest themselves for several months, so liming in the spring is too late for next year’s crop.

You’ll also need to protect your topsoil from the rigors of winter. You have two options here: You can plant a cover crop for large beds or you can apply a mulch. Mulching is more efficient for smaller beds. And landscapers have a ready source of mulch in the leaves that they rake.

Perennial garden beds ideally should be cleaned up and mulched as part of your work in fall gardens. Remove old stalks and leaves — you’ll have to do so in the spring anyways, so you might as well be a step ahead. But if, for whatever reason, you are not able to mulch your perennial beds in the fall, then do not clean away the old stalks and leaves either — they will serve as a makeshift mulch, affording some small degree of protection to the roots of your perennials. In other words, the cleaning and the mulching go together: either do both or neither one. But it is best to do both, in order to keep your garden disease-free and well insulated.

Some garden experts like Aeration Ayr NE recommend spreading compost on the soil as well at this time. I personally disagree with this strategy, feeling that it is a waste of compost. I recommend keeping your compost protected in a compost bin during the winter, waiting until planting season to spread it in the garden.

Winterizing Trees and Shrubs

Winterize small deciduous shrubs that have fragile branches with a lean-to or some other sort of structure to keep heavy snows off their limbs. Deciduous shrubs provide no interest in winter anyways, so you are not losing anything visually by covering them. Evergreens, by contrast, are the cornerstone of winter landscaping aesthetics.

To a great degree winterizing trees and larger shrubs can be achieved simply by watering them properly in the fall, since the winter damage that they sustain often stems from their inability to draw water from the frozen earth. “Avoid watering trees in late summer or early fall before the leaves fall so they can ‘harden off’ for winter,” states Sherry Lajeunesse, in a Montana State University Extension article.

“Then in late fall, after deciduous trees drop their leaves but before the ground freezes, give both evergreen and deciduous trees and shrubs a final deep watering to last them through the winter.” The same source also reminds us to “water under the entire canopy area and beyond,” to cover the entire root area.

Prepare Your Tools for Winter

While caring for the living areas of your yard will take up most of your time and energy, your tools deserve some attention too. Proper storage and maintenance of your gear will help get your spring gardening get off to a great start.

Bring in the garden hose and go down into the basement to turn off its water source in the fall. You don’t want those pipes bursting when the temperatures fall into the teens, do you?

With winter approaching, your “pampered beasts” are no longer going to be the lawn mower and rototiller. The snowblower is again ready to assume that honor. Snow is as much a reality of the northern landscape in winter as grass is in summer. Pamper your snowblower accordingly! Make sure you change the oil, install a new spark plug, inspect belts for wear and replace if necessary, lube the drive and chasis and fill with fresh, clean gasoline

And what maintenance should you perform on your lawn mower before storing it away? Drain out the gas in late fall. You’ll be glad that you did, next spring, when you go to start up the lawn mower again. Letting the old gas sit around in the lawn mower all winter and get gummy is not conducive to having easy lawn mower maintenance next spring, when you begin mowing again — the lawn mower won’t start up easily.

How to Winterize Your Compost Bin

Winterizing your compost bin. You have worked hard all spring, summer and fall building up your compost pile and mixing it to achieve optimal decomposition. Don’t let any of your work go to waste! You don’t want precious nutrients eroding away or being swept off by wintery gusts and feel free to contact with your local lawn professionals and if you are in Lexington so Lawn Maintenance Ayr NE will be your best choice. If your compost bin has no cover, then cover it with a tarp in the fall. To insulate it from winter freezing so as to hasten its usability in spring, apply a layer of raked leaves on top and all around the perimeter (bagging the leaves if necessary to hold them in place).

While we’ve covered such tasks as winterizing lawns, trees and shrubs and other miscellaneous tasks, you may have specific features on your landscape that will require additional attention in the autumn. For instance, owners of in-ground swimming pools or elaborate water gardens will have to engage in winterizing tasks specific to these features. Always follow manufacturers’ recommendations.

When to Fertilize a Lawn

Knowing when to fertilize your lawn can be challenging and not always as easy as following the instructions on a bag of fertilizer. The natural growth cycle of the lawn dictates specific times to fertilize. If fertilizer is applied at the wrong time, it can weaken or damage the plant, resulting in the opposite of the desired effect. Here's a season-by-season rundown of when to fertilize your lawn.

Spring

Contrary to popular belief, the LAWN CARE HASTINGS NE does not need to be fertilized at the first sign of nice weather in the spring. If a solid lawn care regimen is in place, there will be enough carbohydrate reserves in the grass (from the slow-release fertilizer you applied in previous fall) to last through most of the spring. The carbohydrate reserves in the roots begin to decline in ​​late spring, and this is when you should first apply fertilizer for the growing season ahead.

Summer

A lawn will use its late-spring feeding to restore its carbohydrate reserves so it can get through the ups and downs of summer. Drought, heat, frequent mowing and other stresses can bring a Lawn Care Ayr NE to its knees. By late summer it's ready for another application of fertilizer. Not a lot; just enough to get it through fall. The late-summer application is considered a bridge feeding to get the lawn through the fall.

Fall

By late fall it's time to start thinking about the next season.

A substantial,​ late-season fertilizer application will help maintain some green color in the winter and create a quick green-up in the spring. The late fall application is important so that the lawn has help in the spring but not so much that it interferes with its natural growth cycle. The goal of this feeding is to nourish the lawn for its winter hibernation, not to make it nice and green over the cold months.

Lime

Although not fertilizer, lime is often applied seasonally to adjust pH levels in the soil. A soil test will is the best way to know whether your lawn needs lime (and how much it needs). Although there is not a specific time that is best for applying lime, it is most commonly done in fall, before the ground freezes. Fall is also the best time to aerate a lawn, and applying lime after aerating helps the treatment get into the soil.

Get Local Advice

Growth cycles of turf vary from climate to climate, as does the behavior of various grass types. If you're just following the recommendations on your package of fertilizer, you're getting very generic advice. A better source for tips on Landscaping Ayr NE — and indeed all plant care — is a local extension service. Most universities have an extension that offers free advice online or through a phone-in hotline. The advantage of an extension is that its experts understand how to care for plants in your climate, something a national producer of fertilizer cannot do.

Lawn Care In Winter – Tips On Caring For Winter Lawns

Without mowing or weeding, winter is a good duration for Lawn Care OC.  It does not mean that you can leave your lawn thoroughly. By following some simple steps along with winter maintenance you can prepare your lawn for spring and make your lawn more beautiful. Keep reading to learn how to care your lawn in winter.

Lawn Service Lincoln NE removal services is the most important and provides the most active methods in winter. When the first freeze is approaching, it effects on the sharpness of the blade of your mower on every single mowing. It reduces your lawn to a shorter length, and protect your grass from being used as the shelter by animals in it in the cold winter. Before the first frost, inflate your lawn to eliminate compaction. After that do the fertilization on your lawn. While low activity on the grass, the fertilizer will be planted between the leaves and gradually bless and feed them throughout the year.

Be sure to move and fertilize the lawn. Your lineal movements will give you the clear straight lines of healthy grass in the spring.

The simple tip for winter NE Lawn Care after taking these steps is to clean the fallen leaves and remove anything from the grass, such as tools, toys or branches. As the weather progresses, new branches and fallen leaves will be removed. The weight of these items during the winter can kill your lawn or can damage.

For the same reason, people do not stop walking in the grass. Keep roads and curb clear on snow and ice to prevent people from taking lawn shortcuts. Do not park a vehicle in the winter Lawn Service, as it can cause serious damage.

Salt can eliminate many of the benefits of winter lawn care. Do not kick or bend the snow over your lawn and try to use the smallest value of salt in the neighborhood. If you need salt, choose mixtures based on calcium chloride, lower than sodium chloride.

Here at Russell’s we are on many different social media sites and has very good reputation in between Leaf Removal NE. We always love to see new followers and friends and love having people like or favorite the work that we do so please, feel free to follow the work that we do by either befriending or following us!

We are constantly posting current jobs that we take on to allow anyone to see the fantastic quality work that we always provide to each and every clients big or small. Always feel free to comment or reach out to us for any questions you may have.

Winter Lawn Care Tips For Greener Spring

Winter is when most people spend the least amount of time thinking about their lawns. In the Columbia, each lawn mower is tucked away for a long winter’s nap, and their owners are thinking more about upcoming snowfalls than starting up their lawn maintenance routines again next spring. While Jack Frost is still nipping at your nose, here are a few helpful lawn care service habits to remember now and in the year ahead.

Fertilizing in winter

Late fall or early winter is the best time to fertilize cool season grasses such as rescues, rye grasses and bluegrass’s. A thorough lawn fertilization using the proper product gives a healthy advantage. Just as animals need to store food for hibernation, your lawn needs to fill up for survival during dormancy. Many nutrients can be lost from the soil during the hot summer months and the fall growing season. Once the snow falls, the fertilizer will remain in the soil and feed your lawn’s roots all winter long. You can also use the professional Landscapers AYR services to take care of your lawn in or earlier winter.

Mowing strategies

During the last month of fall, gradually lower the cutting base of your lawn mower each time you mow until you reach a turf length of 2 to 2-½ inches in height. Slowly cutting your grass shorter will allow it to winter well without the shock of cutting it low all at once. According to the OC Landscaping shorter grass helps protect the newer, more fragile growth appearing late in the growing season. Lawns left too tall make tempting homes for field mice and other burrowing animals looking for a warm dwelling under the insulating protection of snow. Large portions of lawns can be damaged and dead spots are likely to appear where grasses are pulled for building nests and structures, or where burrowing of holes and tunnels occur.

Keep it clean

It is easy to overlook items on the lawn after temperatures drop, and you spend less time outdoors. Accidentally overlooked objects left resting during cold weather or under snow accumulation can leave turf thin, stunted or bare. Removing items such as lawn furniture, toys, logs, branches and leaves can save a lot of time repairing damage later. Your final mow is a great time to check for these items. Fallen leaves can be easily turned into healthy, natural mulch with a few passes of your local Roseland NE lawn care experts , saving you from back-breaking raking, bagging and removal. As winter progresses, occasionally bundle up for some fresh air and walk around your lawn, keeping gentle watch for new items that may appear and need relocating or other attention. A few minutes of prevention can save hours of more costly repairs later.

Avoid excessive lawn traffic

Grass is relatively resilient, but it will have a difficult time recovering if a path becomes well-worn. Your shorter-cut, brown-colored, dormant grass can be quite vulnerable to heavy use and foot traffic. Encourage people and pets to rotate frequent areas of use often, so patterns do not become concentrated. Keep sidewalks cleared of ice and snow, so you and your guests won’t be tempted to cut across the yard very often. Use a salt-free alternative to melt icy walk areas near contact with turf to avoid salt damage. Just say NO to parking a truck or a car on your lawn. Even the smallest vehicle will leave impressions in the soil and kill off the grass that is underneath the tires. Using the lawn as a parking lot is the fastest way to kill the good grass and make room for crabgrass and other types of weeds. For these all you can hire the Lawn Mowing professionals so to make your lawn beautiful and to prevent it from being damage.

Other factors

The weight from heavy snowfalls and piled-up snow from plowing or play can cause soil compaction. Compaction depletes healthy soil by impeding air, moisture and nutrients from reaching roots, and preventing earthworms and other healthy microbes from thriving. A late fall or spring core aeration can greatly benefit most lawns once per year.

Winter-prepared lawn

Proper fall lawn preparation is time well spent to help ensure a beautiful, lush yard once spring rolls around again — even through the harshest winter. When the north wind is ready for spring break, the snow will once again melt away to reveal what is green and eager to get growing!

Level out an Uneven Lawn With Topdressing

Areas of a lawn can become uneven over time, due to “settling” and other factors. In the least extreme cases, you will want to solve the problem by “topdressing,” which allows you to level out your lawn. Is this problem new to you? If you have never experienced it, you may need a brief introduction to it — and its solution — in order to understand what it is all about. The following exchange between a reader of my Landscaping website and a lawn care expert at Yardworx Lawn and Landscape provides a case study that will help bring you up to speed.

The Problem: Low Spots Develop in a Lawn, Making the Surface Uneven

Reader, Springtime writes, “I have a lawn that was put on over a ledge where the house was build in 2006. Now the lawn is very uneven with dips in the surface that can twist your ankle while walking. The grass is in bad shape too and looks dead in places. One side of the lawn is sloping. What should I do?”

The answer to this question follows:

The Solution: How Bad Are Those Low Spots?

Most of us enjoy our turf grass lawns as a great foundation for outdoor activity. Maintaining our lawns properly is very important, in part, to ensure safe and enjoyable outdoor activity. A lawn needs to be smooth to avoid injuries that might be caused from stepping on an uneven surface. Your grass is the “floor” of an outdoor living space, and floors need to provide stability.

A level and even lawn is also easier to maintain. Who wants to mow a lawn with low spots in it, right?

Not only is it uncomfortable (as when you drive your car over potholes), but it can also cause you to scalp the grass (because, as the mower drops down when the tires pass over low spots, the level of the mower blade also drops, plunging into the higher spots and cutting the grass there much too low).

So what is the solution to the problem of low spots? It really depends on the severity: are we talking about some minor depressions, extreme cratering, or something in between? The solution differs accordingly, which is why the response must be broken up into three parts, which we will term Methods 1, 2, and 3:

Method 1 — Leveling Out a Mildly Uneven Lawn by Topdressing

Topdressing the low spots works well for leveling mildly uneven areas; it is the least invasive approach. Here is what to do:

1. According to the AYR Nebraska Lawn Care, in a wheelbarrow or similar container, mix up a batch of topsoil, sand, and compost — basically, a soil medium that can support turfgrass growth.
2. Apply 1/2 inch of this soil mixture on top of the low areas. Do not make it deeper than that, because this approach must be gradual, so that you do not smother the grass.
3. Rake the topdressing to spread it out evenly.
4. With a push-broom, work the soil mixture in between the blades of grass as thoroughly as possible.
5. Monitor the progress in the area. Eventually, you should see just grass, no dirt (assuming there were no bare spots before you began the process of topdressing). If it is still uneven, keep repeating these steps until it is level. If the spot is level now, then you are done.

But if you had bare spots in the area before you started topdressing it, you will have to overseed the lawn in these areas.

Method 2 — Leveling Out a Moderately Uneven Lawn: “Sweeping the Dirt Under the Carpet”

The topdressing process described above takes time to work. What if you have a few really low spots in your lawn? Obviously, topdressing would not be very effective, because (since you have to proceed 1/2 inch at a time) you would be waiting forever. Yet, since, it is only a few low spots that we are talking about, there would be no need to take the kinds of drastic measures described in Method 3. Fortunately, there is an lawn care intermediate method. I call it “sweeping the dirt under the carpet,” because you are essentially picking up sod (the carpet) and putting dirt under it. This method works as follows:

1. Remove the sod over the low spot (if the area is bigger than 1 foot square, cut out multiple chunks, since a piece of sod greater than 1 foot square is hard to move around without breaking) and set it aside.
2. Shovel enough topsoil into the hole that, once you replace the sod, the area will be even.
3. As you shovel the soil into the hole, add water. This will remove air pockets. The last thing you want is for the sod to settle after you have finished — which would defeat the whole purpose of the project.
4. Replace the sod and water the grass.

Method 3 — How to Level Out a Lawn That Looks Like a Moonscape

Finally, we come to the most extreme end of the spectrum. Is your lawn so littered with craters that it looks like the surface of the moon? If the uneven areas are substantial enough and numerous enough that neither topdressing nor the sweep-the-dirt-under-the-carpet method will solve the problem, then you may need to do a more major renovation by regrading the area and establishing a new stand of turfgrass. To accomplish this, you need to take the same steps that you would take to establish a new lawn, except that you are applying these steps to a smaller area.

Fertilizing Your Garden or Lawn in Late Fall

The Benefits of Fall Fertilizer

Recent years have seen some reexamination of the long-standing practice of applying fertilizer to a lawn or garden in late fall, but in most lawn-care programs in cold-weather climates where winters are a period of dormancy, a late fertilizer application is still recommended. A mild feeding to ornamental garden beds or vegetable gardens can also replenish soil that has been heavily depleted by growing plants over the season.

Consumers are advised to be a little wary of the recommendations from Lawn Service Lincoln NE company and manufacturers of granular and liquid fertilizers, as their interests are in selling products and services. However, independent scientific studies from university programs do confirm that late summer and fall are especially good times to fertilize turf lawns.

Fall is the time when cool season grasses recover from summer stresses such as drought, heat, and disease. If the yard worx has been properly fertilized in the late summer and fall, turf grass can begin to store carbohydrate reserves in the stems, rhizomes, and stolons. These carbohydrate reserves help grass resist winter injury and disease, and serve as a source of energy for root and shoot growth the following spring. A late fall fertilization will also provide better winter color, enhanced spring green up and increased rooting.

When to Fertilize

Although the exact timing can vary due to weather conditions and climate zone, the final fertilizer application should be made sometime in November in most regions--at the point when the grass has stopped growing or has slowed down to the pint of not needing to be mowed.

Do not wait until the ground freezes, however. Ideally, there is still active growth occurring, but not enough to warrant mowing.

Proper timing is essential. If fertilizer is applied too early while grass or garden plants are vigorously growing, it can invite winter injury and snow mold the following spring.

Do not ever apply fertilizer to frozen soil or over snow or ice.

We are the best choice you ever have if yard workers needed.

How Much Fertilizer Is Needed?

Nitrogen is the most important nutrient for a fall fertilizer. A recommended dose for lawns if for 1 lb. of soluble nitrogen be applied for each 1000 square feet, or  1.5  to 2 lb. of slow-release nitrogen for each 1000 square feet. A complete fertilizer with a high ratio of both nitrogen and potassium (K)  is essential for enhanced rooting, cold hardiness, disease resistance and wear tolerance. Be wary of applying a fertilizer with too much phosphorus (P), since run-off of this nutrient can be very damaging to rivers and streams.

The recommendations for flower and vegetable AYR Nebraska are similar. A mild fertilizer feeding in the fall will replenish the soil and prepare it for a quicker green-up when planting begins the following spring. Gardens do better with this approach than with a heavy dose of fertilizer in the early spring.

Did You Know?

Many university studies have concluded that most homeowners overfertilize their lawns and gardens. Too much nitrogen can be as damaging to plants as too little, and using natural sources of nutrients, such as compost on the garden or mulching lawn clippings rather than bagging them, can replace some of the traditional chemical fertilizer applications. Most studies now conclude that one late- to mid-summer feeding of a lawn, followed by a light fall feeding, produces a better lawn than the old recommendation for three or four major feedings for each growing season, as championed by fertilizer manufacturers.

Flower or vegetable gardens similarly can thrive with fewer fertilizer applications than once believed, especially if they are properly amended with compost and other natural organic materials.

Most gardens do very well with one feeding shortly after planting and one as the growing season concludes, although plants that produce large quantities of vegetables or very large, plentiful flowers may need more.