Bet You DON'T Know This About Nitrogen Lawn Fertilizers

you probably think you know what nitrogen fertilizers do to the lawn to the grass to plants in general but i'm confident that about 99 of you don't really get it at least don't get it all the way yeah nitrogen does make the grass green it makes it grow makes it more lush and full but that's not the point i can assure you that you are most likely wasting your money on fertilizer and wasting a lot of time in the lawn now let me explain with a brief story my great grandfather was an engineer and a magnificent auto mechanic so i'm told he died when i was four years old one of the earliest stories that i recall my dad telling me about him was a story from my dad's time in college he was driving his car and it broke down he had the car towed to his grandfather's house and my great-grandfather at that time diagnosed the problem and decided that a new part needed to be made made my great grandfather then proceeded to forge from scrap metal a completely brand new part for my dad's car and he fixed it while my dad sat in the kitchen with his grandmother eating cookies or something like that what struck me about this story is not that he fixed my dad's car and he didn't replace the part he literally made a new part from scratch i'm also told in his automotive brilliance that well into his 90s every single year he would take his own car apart piece by piece all the way down to the nuts and bolts just so that he could clean them and get the car running as good as possible then he would put the entire car back together and it would run probably better than when it was brand new for him doing this was like general automotive maintenance he did this regularly right up there with changing the oil and putting gas into the tank you see he understood for a car to run well all of the parts all of the systems had to be tuned up they all had to be clean they all had to be addressed now when we fertilize our lawns with nitrogen we're obviously pushing top growth we're making the grass greener but if we're only fertilizing with nitrogen we are completely disregarding the entire rest of the mechanism the entire grass system is more complex than just green growth so here's my question to you do you think nitrogen in the grass is kind of like oil in the car maybe but maybe not nitrogen is the nutrient that argons need in the greatest quantity of all of the macros the in and the p and the k nitrogen is the biggest if we don't fertilize with it at all our grass will grow sluggishly at best as it tries its hardest to find nitrogen from the general environment because of this it will use very little phosphorus potassium and all of the other miners if the grass isn't growing vigorously it's not going to use hardly any of the other nutrients either if however we do fertilize with nitrogen then our grass will grow fast and vigorously it will stay deep green simply because there is such an easy source of plant available nitrogen in the soil but without the other nutrients in the soil the grass may look good to the naked eye but in any other way of measuring it it is not healthy it's on the decline nitrogen is not the oil in the car it does not help your grass run efficiently and smoothly nitrogen is the gas that goes in the tank it drives the car without nitrogen the grass doesn't grow without gas the car doesn't go the engine doesn't purr with gas alone your car will run but over time through neglect the rest of the car will break down furthermore let's assume that you give your car enough gas to run for a hundred thousand miles your car is going to consume a lot of oil brake fluid you're gonna run through tire treads you're going to use up a lot of extra fluids a lot of other parts that have nothing to do with the gas simply because you're driving it so far if however you only supply your car with enough gas to go 100 miles you're hardly going to go through any other fluids or parts and virtually nothing is going to be depleted the nitrogen that you supply to your lawn through fertilizers by itself is going to push growth it's going to produce chlorophyll it's going to help root systems of your grass absorb nutrients in water better but when those nutrients those other nutrients aren't available in the soil for the root systems to absorb the nitrogen itself is going to start pushing unsustainable growth soils store nutrients in them all the time it's what they do and if we're not adding to the nutrient storage capacity of our soil it will be depleted over time whatever minor nutrients are already in your soil if you're not adding to them will be used up and what's fascinating to me and completely misunderstood by many people is if we apply minor nutrients only to the soil without nitrogen those minor nutrients almost never get absorbed into the plant system because the nitrogen is not there to push growth if the growth isn't happening then those minor nutrients don't need to be called upon just like your brake fluid doesn't need to be used in the car if you're not driving the car a plant is simply never going to uptake more micronutrients than it needs but if we're pushing excessive growth it can grow with a deficiency of micronutrients the takeaway here is that if you ever plan on fertilizing your lawn with nitrogen you have to also plan on adding the other macronutrients and other minor nutrients to your fertilization schedule as well and to abide by the law minimums we also have to think about the trace elements those things that should be in top soils but are so lacking in them these days without focusing on the soil ecosystem and the entire set of systems that cause grass to grow and stay healthy our lawns will only look their best for so long two of the most important lawn care videos that i've produced for this channel were filmed in march of this year back before i had hardly any subscribers at all and back before most anyone was mowing the grass let alone fertilizing it i'll be providing links to both of those videos down in the description below at the end screen of this video and down in the comments as well both of them are long-form learning videos their deep dives into the general topic of giving the best nutrition to your lawn possible the first video is all about getting the npk ratio right in your lawn over the course of a full season the second video is a deep dive into the minor nutrients and the trace elements the stuff that people don't think about when they think about fertilizing the lawn and as an extra bonus i'll have another link down there to another video at the same exact time that i publish all about urea nitrogen urea is the most common form of nitrogen thrown down on lawns and it is wasted heavily in the lawn and garden space today amongst the smoky haze of my surrounding landscape and the small amounts of ash falling from the sky there's wild fires all around us out here on the west coast i don't want to be outside in this environment right now but fall is coming very soon and we need to be prepared for the fall fertilization push and the thing is we need to be prepared to do it right in the products that we choose and how we fertilize the lawn watch one of those videos please they will help you gain an understanding a better understanding of how to fertilize your lawn

Channel: Turf Mechanic

Views: 80,621

Keywords: grass, lawncare, gardening, lawnmower, lawn mower, lawn care, thatch

Id: nW-qj6up6sU

Length: 7min 38sec (458 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021