Milorganite Alternative | Purely Organic Lawn Food

[Music] [Music] so I am back from my trip over the weekend if you didn't see where I was the video on that coming very soon but for those of you who follow me on Instagram I'm sure you saw kind of what I was up to so I posted a lot of things on Instagram on my story and just a few photos of the lawn and things like that in between my videos so if you want to check that out cool if you're on Instagram go ahead and check it out at Ryan or lawn care so today I am in the backyard it's happening now as we're getting to a point of the year we're starting to lose a little bit of color so this hasn't had anything since last fall and you're gonna say to me Ryan I'll know what you're talking about look at this right here looks fine to me well you see your yard every single day and you know how it looks and you kind of know when it starts to lose color when it starts to need something so that's about where I'm at right now the problem is is that it's springtime and that it's still growing like crazy so although I don't really want to add a lot of nitrogen right now now is about when I would normally put some my first app with fertilizer down if I've been doing heavy fertilizer in the fall which I've been doing for that past few years so what we're gonna do today is I'm going to give you a little bit of an option that I'm going to try as an alternative to milorganite because if you've watched my previous videos to spring you know that I don't need any more phosphorus in my lawn so I have to come up with some kind of option there that's going to give us a different plan if I don't want to go with that and we also know that milorganite it's been having problems with shortages things like that and so I'm gonna try to find an option here for you guys that you might want to use that might be affordable and so that's what we're gonna do today so many of you are probably gonna ask right away why I just don't go with ringer as that's been an option for people for a long time but the fact is is that it's kind of expensive that's one thing and two they've changed the formula a little bit this year so I don't know kind of how that factors into the product compared to what it used to be so there's an option here that's very similar to what ringer used to be it's available at Home Depot or you can have it ordered into your store or I bought some money Amazon [Music] so this is actually a plant-based organic product so it's got some soybean meal in there a few other things but it's more of a plant-based fertilizer so we know milorganite is actually a biosolids product meaning that is taken from wastewater they do a process with that and then they get a fertilizer out of that so it's a little bit different but why I like to keep this backyard organic is one it's a really good option for all of our pets and everything that's out here and two it's just that it's great for beginners to learn how to spread fertilizer you know what to be quite as careful with the rates you can go a little bit more you can go a little bit less that's really why I like to do that and I like to keep this backyard looking pretty good with minimal inputs so this is a 10:02 product again that gives me no phosphorous and a little bit of potassium out I'd like maybe just a little bit more potassium if possible but it's okay for what I'm doing right now if I needed to add more in the future I could actually add just a potassium product if I wanted to but I think this would be a good option for those who are looking to get away from the phosphorus if your soil test kind of indicated that or if you're just looking for a product that you can use that would be organic you can't find anything like milorganite around you think this is going to be an interesting option going forward so this bag says it's gonna cover 5000 square feet now that would be at a rate of 0.5 pounds of nitrogen onto the ground so I'll probably go a little bit heavier than that here I normally did i'm milorganite I normally did an application of around 3/4 of a pound to a little bit more than that sometimes so I'm probably gonna go with a similar app here and I have 3,500 square feet inside of my fence line so I'll probably just try to stick with that spreader setting that's listed on the bag and then we'll just see how far it goes and that way you guys know and of how it spreads out and how it works that way there's one thing specifically that I don't like about this spreader it's this little stand here because you can see how wobbly it is so you just have to make sure you're very careful about that when you're pouring in fertilizers or fill it up on your driveway or something like that but here in my backyard I don't really have any cement to do that with so I just have to be pretty careful with that have to see if it smells like success it smells like a brewery so that's good in my book now on the back here it says a setting of eleven and a half for the turf builder edge guard so knowing from my experience I feel like that might be a little bit heavy but I'll start on that setting I'll do a pass or two and see if it's coming out like crazy which I feel like it's gonna be too heavy for me so we'll find out [Music] as I suspected that looks like it's a little bit heavy here so I'm gonna dial it down just a little bit maybe around ten and a half or so and try that [Music] setting of ten on there looks a little bit better I feel like it still could be just slightly heavy so I might dial it back just a touch here and then we're gonna do the full application here on the rest of the backyard and see how much I have left [Music] okay so here's what I ended up with a setting of nine and a half and I covered 3,500 square feet put all the bag in there so that's about what I have left here think somewhere around there maybe a little bit lower on the setting would get you closer to covering that 5,000 square feet you definitely need to go a little bit lower on your setting if you want to cover that but like I said the nice thing about organics is that we don't have to be as careful with that I wanted to put out a little bit more than what the coverage would be for 5000 square feet so I'm just gonna set this a little bit lower go over the yard in the other direction and put the rest of this out [Music] how much nitrogen did we put down then if I covered 3,500 square feet with that bag we can figure that out I'm certainly no math wizard here but it's not too difficult to figure out so the bag has ten percent nitrogen in it so let's take 100 and divide that by ten we get ten obviously so 10 pounds per thousand would give us one pound of nitrogen on the ground so what we cover here with the rate that I put down so that's a 25 pound bag we're going to divide that by 3.5 for 3,500 square feet we come up with seven point one four so that's seven point one four pounds of this product that I put down on that 3,500 square feet so seven point one four times point one zero which is our nitrogen percentage of 10 equals 0.714 pounds of nitrogen down on that section right now so round that off we're very close to three-quarters of a pound of nitrogen that I just put down on that section so if you wanted to cover 5,000 square feet with this bag you'd have to put down five pounds of product per thousand square feet and that would get you 5000 square feet out of a 25 pound bag a lot of math there if you didn't like that part I'm sorry but I just want to let you know if you are interested in that then that's how much we put down on this backyard and that gives you an idea of what kind of coverage you get with the rate that I used one thing that you might notice with this product compared to the milorganite product as far as color goes is that milorganite contains iron in the actual fertilizer so that kind of pop of blue-green color that you get from milorganite shortly after you apply it it's actually mainly from the iron from my experience so this doesn't contain that but you could add application of iron by a couple different ways I'll probably be using the lawn energizer from simple lawn there's different forms of chelated liquids you can apply there's iron it-- which is a granular product there's different things you could do there to get some iron on the lawn and the other thing to mention with this one is that this is 7.1 percent water soluble nitrogen so you want to actually water this in after the application if you can that's gonna jumpstart things a little bit quicker since there's more water soluble in there so I actually really enjoyed the way the fertilizer spread I felt that was really easy to do you can see it very easily where it's going the color of it in the smell if you do like beer or breweries and stuff like that I think it smells fantastic there's one other thing I'm gonna add today which is an application of soil Hume I talked about this in a couple of my previous videos if you'd like to check out how to apply that a little bit more about it I'll have a video for you if you have any comments or questions on this video just let me know thank you so much for watching we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Ryan Knorr Lawn Care

Views: 194,988

Keywords: milorganite, milorganite alternative, milorganite replacement, purely organic fertilizer, purely organic lawn food review, purely organic lawn food, milorganite fertilizer, organic lawn fertilizer, milorganite shortage 2019, milorganite shortage, alternative to milorganite, spring lawn care, lawn, lawn care, lawn care tips, ryan knorr lawn care, fertilizer application, soil hume

Id: qRcgeQlj_Zc

Length: 9min 58sec (598 seconds)

Published: Tue May 14 2019