If you are thinking about fertilizing a customer’s lawn and you’re not sure which fertilizer to use, it’s worth finding out some basic facts about the stuff to help you along the way.

For starters not all fertilizers are the same.  It’s important to take a good look at the packaging before you decide what to buy, rather than going on price.  While the same three basic ingredients are used in all fertilizers, not all of them will appear in every bag you buy.  This is why it’s important to make sure you know what you are buying and using each time.

Lawns need many more elements than just three things if they are to survive and flourish.  But with that said you won’t need to provide all of them yourself as the lawn will get much of what it needs directly from the soil underneath it.

Fertilizer is used to provide potassium, nitrogen and phosphorus more than anything else.  But as we have already discovered you won’t find these three ingredients in every single bag on sale today.  If you want a good all round fertilizer it is important to check the contents to ensure these three ingredients are all inside the bag.  If you find something that only has one or two of them it might be cheaper, but it won’t necessarily bring the results you really want.

Of course every lawn will be different.  For instance one lawn might be perfectly okay with its phosphorus levels, but it could be lacking in nitrogen.  If this is the case you will find that you won’t need an all round complete solution, as a fertilizer with phosphorus included will suffice for its needs.

How do you check what you need for any particular lawn?  The answer is simple – you’ll need a kit that enables you to check the content of the soil under the lawn.  This will tell you what it already has in abundance and more importantly what it needs from now on.  You can then buy the appropriate fertilizer for that customer’s lawn.

As you can see, as a lawn care specialist it pays to have a few bags of different fertilizers in your truck for these kinds of occasions.  You can build up to this stage as you get more experience and more customers.  Make sure you have some soil testing kits in your truck too.  This way, you can test the soil on the spot and treat it at the same time as well if you have the right mix of fertilizer the lawn needs.

Fertilizer can’t always be applied straightaway though.  A lot could depend on the weather.  For instance if you are in the middle of a heat wave it would be better to wait for it to subside before applying the fertilizer.  But it should be well watered in whenever you apply it, to make sure it does its job perfectly.  Always read the instructions and go from there.

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