Cheapest Fertilizer For Your Lawn + Back Yard Update!

the last two weeks have been miserable weather-wise it's been cold wet dreary at one point we didn't see the sun for almost a week not ideal for grass growing when i scalped my backyard it was 70 degrees now we're living in the 40s i was really hoping the grass would be a lot further along than this but that's okay better weather is on the horizon and we're gonna get right back on track i can feel it [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey guys it's jesse with lawn life and today we're going to talk about the cheapest way to fertilize your lawn also we're going to talk about the update on my backyard for those of you that are new i decided to take my kentucky bluegrass backyard and maintain the height of cut at one inch this year so a couple weeks ago i went in and scalped it down to a half of an inch dethatched scalped it again and now it's currently recovering well the last two weeks the weather has been complete crap it's been in the 40s it's been cloudy wet just not good weather for growing grass but now we have some good weather on the way so i think it's a great time to get out there and give it some fertilizer and really push that top grill so it can start filling in dense like my front grass did you definitely don't want to push top growth too much in the spring but with my backyard i really want it to fill in so i'm gonna give it a little boost and hopefully with this weather coming it's gonna fill in nice and dense and get ready for summer now here's my backyard after we sculpt two weeks ago and then this is what it looks like today and and from eye level it actually looks pretty good now once you start walking on top of it or you look down from the house out from the window it looks pretty thin there are definitely a lot of areas that need to fill in more dense and it will get there especially with this weather coming up but what i think the plan is going forward is going to be to spoon feed this thing weekly or every two weeks just to give it a little boost and hopefully help it fill in a little more dense now a couple people ask me about these dog spots and honestly i don't think i'm going to do anything with them i'm just going to let them be i mean i don't have enough time to train the dog to go into one spot and he needs somewhere to go to the bathroom so it just is what it is and honestly it really doesn't even bug me anymore um it's a really an eyesore for if you're to look at the grass it's probably the first thing you notice but for me i don't even notice it anymore so it doesn't even bug me so i'm just gonna let it go basically whatever you let annoy you in your grass is what's going to annoy you if you just don't care anymore it basically doesn't bother you it's not going to bug you so it's basically on you the little things in your grass that are going to really irritate you the most like this patch of clover over here this needs to go it irritates me so that really bugs me and i'm going to get it out of there it's just a personal preference thing like the dog spots don't bother me now if the dog was to pee on my front yard that bugs me i don't like when he pees in the front yard i instantly go over with a hose and spray it off so so basically pick your poison if you if there's something in your yard that you just don't want it to bug you just try erasing it from your mind and not let it bug you like these pea spots they're not going to bug me the rest of the year [Music] now as you can see right here in this strip this is where i brought my grass low last year and then this is a test plot over here next to it with four different varieties of bluegrass in it and a lot of weeds that i need to get rid of so the rest of the yard is going to end up looking like this strip it just needs some time and i'm hoping the nitrogen helps it fill in especially with this weather coming so that's the plan going forward is to really get this thing nice and dense and just keep cutting it at one inch the fertilizer we're going to use today is urea and urea is by far the cheapest fertilizer you can buy for fertilizing your lawn for 150 pound bag it cost me 30 and i think i even overspent usually you can get a bag of urea for fifteen to twenty dollars there's just not too many places that i can buy it close to me so i bite the bullet and pay the thirty dollars for the fifty pound bag now within that fifty pound bag of urea there is 23 pounds of nitrogen now let's compare that to milorganite i know how much you guys hate doing math so i'm just i did the math already for us so within one 32 pound bag of milorganite which is going for 18 a bag right now at home depot there is 1.92 pounds of nitrogen in that bag if you're comparing each bag there is 11 and a half times more nitrogen in one bag of urea compared to the malaria knife now you're not going to get the iron you're not going to get the phosphorus that you get in milorganite you're also not going to get that slow release capability that malarga knight has now there are some pros when it comes to urea on the opposite spectrum of that urea is a fast release fertilizer so that as soon as that thing goes on it's working so you're getting that fertilizer working right away so you're going to get results faster now the con to that is you're going to have to work harder to put that nitrogen down with urea when it comes to urea you usually don't want to put it in a spreader and spread it like you normally would with milorganite because the urea is so strong it's very very hard to get even coverage with the big granules and how strong each granule is if you do do that it's going to be very hard to get the even coverage you have a chance to burn your yard and also if you do get it out evenly it's still going to look polka dotted because when the granules go out each one of those granules is hitting a spot in your grass and that's where the nitrogen is hitting so getting that nice even coverage is really tough last year i did it with a hand spreader and i did it weekly in small amounts and at first you could kind of get that polka dotted look in your grass but after a week or two it disappeared because if you just keep doing it over and over eventually it just spreads out and you start getting that even coverage over time so what i like to do is dissolve the urea and water and then do a full year application with my backpack sprayer foliar means basically i'm spraying the leaves of the grass and those leaves are sucking in the nitrogen instead of from the root system the con that comes with this is you'll have three separate applications with your backpack sprayer compared to one with granular form and basically that's what you're going to be paying the price for with the urea yes it's cheaper but you're probably going to be doing more work the nice thing about spraying foliar applications is that you can do this all the way through summer and it's not going to affect your grass i know a lot of people are scared to fertilize their grass in the middle of summer because of how much stress it's already under and you don't want to push that top growth with foliar applications you don't really have to worry with that about that as much because you're giving it so little at a time that it's just giving enough to to keep that color keep the growth and really not stress it out at all all right guys i'm going to walk you through how to turn your urea into a liquid form and dissolve it so first thing is my water ph is right around nine so we want to lower that ph so the plant can actually uptake what we're putting on it way easier um i have some citric acid here and a little bit of this stuff goes a really long way so i'm going to put in 0.1 ounces per thousand square feet so my backyard is 4 000 square feet so i'm going to put in 0.4 ounces in my water and check my ph and see if we're close to where we want we want it to be around five five and a half last year i put in too much on a couple of my doses where my ph was like 1.5 or something crazy and i still put in my iron in my uh urea and there was no effects on the yard and it worked just fine so if you go a little under that's fine nothing bad's gonna happen i've done it before but i'm gonna try getting it around five five and a half but it's really hard because this stuff goes a little bit if it goes so far so i'm gonna put in four ounces hopefully there's point four [Applause] i put it in here in my drill battery is dead so i'm going to do this manually [Applause] [Music] and using warm water helps everything that's all the way easier so if you can put warm water in if not it'll still work with cold water but warm water looks better [Applause] all right check the ph and we're right about four so even point one per thousand uh is a little too much but four or four i'm closer to five of these so the next step is to figure out how much urea you're going to need to cover the square footage of your yard so i want to put in 0.2 pounds of your urea per thousand square feet so how you do that is you're going to take 0.2 divide that by the percentage of nitrogen that's in urea so there's 46 nitrogen so you divide 0.2 divided by 0.46 and that's going to give you 0.44 or 0.43 pounds per thousand so i have 4 000 square feet so many times that times 4 and it says 1.739 so i'm going to round up to 1.75 pounds of urea i'm going to need to put on 0.2 pounds of nitrogen per thousand it sounds very confusing but it's very simple um so i'm going to need 1.75 pounds of urea to cover what i need to [Music] there it is that's one and three quarters pound and you dump her in and give it a good stir [Applause] so there's a lot of impurities in the urea so there's a lot of like little chunks of stuff that are floating around you're going to want to make sure you have a filter on your backpack spray or a way to filter this out because otherwise it's going to clog up your [Music] sprayer all right now we're good to go and we're ready to spray now before you go out and spray your yard you're going to want to calibrate your sprayer and there are plenty of videos on youtube to show you how to calibrate your sprayer basically what that means is you want to be able to spray exactly how much liquid you have on the square footage of your yard because if you get to the end and you have way too much then you didn't put down the correct amount that you wanted to in the first place or if you get to halfway through and all of it's gone you put on way more than you wanted to so you need to calibrate your sprayer so you know exactly how much you're putting down now as far as spraying goes it's really simple you just walk in a straight line and you want basically your strips of liquid to touch the tips of each other so you want to keep spraying back and forth and you just want to walk your yard until all of the liquid is gone hopefully once you get to the end so by far urea is the cheapest option when it comes to fertilizer but it is a little more work if you guys have any questions about foliar applications or urea fertilizer in general just leave your question below and i'll be sure to answer to it if you guys can subscribe hit those notifications i'd really appreciate it i really want to grow this channel for you guys and bring you as much content as possible otherwise i'll see you next time on lawn life [Music] you

Channel: LAWN LIFE

Views: 61,518

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Id: 23AdwZKeD8g

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021