Identifying and Recovering From Fertilizer Burn! #fertilizer #lawn #diy

here i am from my backyard oasis wait it looks like a barren wasteland in this video i'm going to tell you what happened why it happened and how you can prevent this from happening to your yard so let's get out of the weeds [Music] thank you for coming back to yet another video if you guys like these videos please be sure to like and subscribe to this channel if you're not already so what i want to do in this video is talk a little bit about understanding issues and problems you may have with your lawn kind of in relation to what i have going on currently with my lawn as you can see from the introduction to this video my lawn is looking really brown right now i was as shocked as as as what most of you probably are from if you've seen my lawn in the past how nice it looks uh to walk out to my lawn a couple days ago and i started seeing all this just brown everywhere and so i want to kind of walk you guys through what's actually going on with my lawn so everything was going well and good with my yard it was kind of in its summer wall a little bit usually my lawn takes a little bit to recover after i kind of do my fourth of july stuff where i'm on it a lot and painting on it and kind of doing a lot really beating my lawn up so normally this time of year my lawn's still kind of in that recovery mode trying to get back to where it was also with that being in the summer we have the still the high temperatures and everything else that's kind of working against the lawn well everything was going fine with my lawn until a few days ago i go and i look outside and i start noticing some brown spots and i go and i really kind of look around more in my lawn and i see man this is getting pretty widespread and so i really at first i was thinking oh my goodness what in the world happened like is it disease is it insects what could it possibly be so i was thinking through what i've been doing over the last few days and it dawned on me that a few days ago i had actually put down an application of fertilizer so i had it kind of an aha moment of like you got to be kidding me it's fertilizer fern now the reason that i know that it's fertilizer burn in my case is because how quickly it appeared where everything was nice and green and next thing it was just burn up brown completely dead very very quickly in a matter of a day or so after i'd fertilized and then the other thing is is the pattern of which the brown is if i show you here on the screen uh pictures of what it looks like you can actually see almost like perfect 90 degree angles to where it doesn't it's not abnormal or of a natural pattern it's definitely like a man-made created pattern and now whenever i fertilize i follow kind of around my fence line first and then i go kind of go back and forth across my lawn and now you can see the actual burn out spots are very similar they just follow right through kind of where i would have been walking through uh with my spreader so that's when i knew like this isn't my lawn just going brown because of drought or because of disease or insects or some kind of other thing this was actually caused by me now some of you probably be thinking how does this happen to somebody who does fertilizing as often as i do and i've used a lot of different products and things like i thought this was supposed to be something that didn't happen that easily so to reference what i was using i was actually using jonathan green's green up fertilizer which i'd actually used earlier in the year i think two fertilizers ago was when i actually put it down for the first time and they actually really liked it and so then that's why i saw it in the store and i was like it's time for me to fertilize again so this would be a good time to just get this and put it down so it is a synthetic fertilizer so you do run the risk of potentially burning your lawn as opposed to the more natural fertilizers that you see that advertise non-burning and so you always do run a slight risk of it but as long as you're kind of following what the bag and manufacturer recommends you usually won't run into a problem i made a few critical mistakes with putting this down for this application one when i check the manufacturer's website they recommend not to fertilize if the temperatures are above 85 degrees and if it's high humidity well it just so happens that it was definitely over 85 when i put down the fertilizer and it was also very high humidity at the time and on top of that i didn't get it watered in right away it was a day or two later to when i actually got got it watered in my next critical mistake was that i didn't put down the fertilizer at the manufacturer's recommended rate so on the day that i put the fertilizer down i was in a hurry and so instead of normally measuring out my fertilizer for each specific section of my lawn which is what i always do anytime i'm using a synthetic fertilizer i more or less just eyeballed it and so for my lawn for example half of my whole square footage of my lawn is tied up in my side yard it's about 5 000 square feet of my whole total 10 000 square feet so in my mindset for with the bag i need half the bag on that section of my lawn and so instead of weighing it out like i typically do i typically go through the process of doing the calculations of how much fertilizer per thousand square feet and then factor it out for each section of my lawn well since i was in such a hurry i was like okay i'll just do half the bag for my side yard section and then i still have half the bag for the rest of my yard and that will equal my 10 000 square feet well this is all well and good but i don't think i was quite accurate with how much i poured out and then on top of that my spreader setting i didn't really recalibrate my spreader setting to test and make sure that i was putting out the right amount of fertilizer so what ended up happening is is i actually ran short on several sections of my lawn i never normally run short whenever i'm putting off fertilizer just because on my first pass that i do on it on my first section of my lawn that i do i always kind of do a lower setting on this the spreader and then kind of get it more wide open as i kind of determine where the right setting is since i was in a hurry i kind of guesstimated what i thought would be the proper setting and it pushed out a lot more fertilizer a lot quicker than what it needed to do therefore putting down a lot of more fertilizer than what needed on the sections of my lawn now typically whenever it comes to burning your lawn with fertilizer it's not going to happen unless you're normally having like a spill of the fertilizer that's usually going to be the main thing is if you're using a synthetic fertilizer and you happen to spill a bunch of it in a spot now that can really do the trick but in my case i essentially did that in spots just because i was putting it down way too heavy and ran short on my entire lawn now if you do think that you messed something up with the fertilizer that you put down sometimes you could save it in my case i'm not going to be able to save it but if you do think that you spilled fertilizer or you made a mistake and put too much down water it in right away start trying to water it in that's one of the best things that you can probably do you don't just want to leave it sit there if you happen to spill a big pile of it try to spread it out the best that you can just to try to save it but in my case here this stuff is just absolutely fried so now that i've paid the price for my mistake where do i go from here the thing i'm so thankful that we're getting ready to come into fall renovation time in our lawns because i'm going to be able to renovate the sections of my lawn that i completely killed by not being a very smart uh lawn guy and so i'm going to be able to actually aerate and i'll just be able to seed kind of in those areas so what i'm going to do kind of now is just over the next couple weeks as that grass and that comes loosened up i'll start making sure i rake that dead stuff out of there and so that i'll get it to where i'm kind of going to just be seating on bare ground and so if you have a spot that's completely dead in that once you get close to where you're going to be seeding which for us it's not still going to be a few weeks away you really want to rake all that dead stuff out of there and so that way when you put down new seed you can kind of get the good seed to soil contact so that way you can establish some new grass there so now some of you may be like well i've never had this problem with fertilizer burn so this brown spots don't really apply to me i want this kind of lesson to apply anytime you have a brown spot in your lawn because it's important to investigate and figure out what's actually going on and so for me i told you a couple of the clues that stood out to me that made me think that was fertilizer burn was one how quickly it popped up into the fact that it the pattern of it is just looks so mechanical i mean it's literally in the perfect shape of like kind of what my pattern was for when i was pushing out the fertilizer and so now you want to factor that in so if you see a brown spot in your lawn go down and get on your hands and knees and look a little bit closer to try to figure out what's going on a lot of times if it's insects or something you'll prob some of the ones on top of the ground you can actually see and find in your lawn for example if it's grubs that are under the ground you should be able to just pull up that grass right away because they eat the roots out underneath of it if it's lawn disease you should be able to look at the leaf blades and see the actual lesions on the leaf blade that would tell you its disease and so then also so then kind of factor all that in so that you can determine the proper way that you need to treat your lawn so now when i was saying about getting down closely and looking if you look there this is a diseased grass blade so i do have a little bit of disease going on in my lawn but if you see brown spots in your lawn just make sure that you go and really check the grass to see what's going on so this will tell me here okay this isn't drought stress or insect damage this is just lawn disease right here and so you may have that going on right now because we are in a prime season for lawn disease as bad as my lawn looks right now with all the different issues that it has going on i want this to be a message of hope because though it may look bad now shortly it's going to look beautiful again it's going to get back to where where it was you can make huge huge gains in your lawn in a short period of time so if you're looking out in your lawn and it looks so what mine looks like or even worse than what mine looks like don't worry when we get into the fall here it is the prime time to make huge gains in your lawn and you can go from a lawn that looks like a zero to a hero very very quickly if you just follow the proper steps as we kind of get into this fall period lastly i want to give a shout out to one of the subscribers to this channel his name is dave he's a guy that i work with he actually sent me a picture of his lawn here a few days ago and man his lawn is looking perfect um he got a striper here just a a few months ago and so he's new to kind of striping in that and it has changed the game for him now i've never actually been to his house so i can't confirm that this is an actual picture of his house because i do believe that i seen that same picture when i google searched perfect lawns and so dave i'm not sure if you're telling the truth or not but if that's yours man way to go but you know but in all serious man he's doing a great job and so i'm sure some of you are going through a season right now to where your lawn isn't struggling so you watch my videos like this guy doesn't know what he's doing because my lawn lawn's looking great others of us are struggling right now and so it's just one of those things with lawn care is that it's an active living thing and so it goes through seasons just like we do in our own lives sometimes we have good seasons where things are going great in our lives other times we go through seasons where we're really struggling and so the important thing is to just stick with it and then to keep start taking the steps to where you want to be even in your own life if you're not where you want to be whether it's with your weight or whether it's with your relationships or whatever it may be you want to kind of get a step forward find those step-by-step things that you need to do to get things to where they need to be and you will see the results and so that same goes the same thing goes for your lawn if you just take little baby steps each and every day and every time trying to get your best practices in you're going to see great gains in your lawn and pretty soon we will all be out of the weeds and into a beautiful lawn

Channel: Out of the Weeds Lawn Care

Views: 26,599

Keywords: lawn care, lawn fertilizer, brown lawn, fertilizer burn

Id: JtdYmDXX2cY

Length: 13min 17sec (797 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 15 2022