Is organic fertilizer best for your lawn? Organic lawn care and gardening methods are gaining popularity, and they include mulching leaves and grass clippings as one of the best ways to fertilize your lawn.
Merrideth Jiles, who is the garden center manager at The Great Outdoors Nursery and Landscaping Center in Austin, Texas, says, "An attitude that is changing in lawn care and gardening is the popularity of using organics. For a gazillion years, everybody bagged all the grass cuttings and raked up all their leaves. What that does is remove the natural organic material that is supposed to be going back into your lawn."
One just has to look at a thriving meadow to see that Mother Nature, when left alone to carry out her business, knows what she is doing. Based on this observation, many are starting to consider the possibility that the best fertilizer for their lawn has been literally lying around right in front of their noses this whole time. So, instead of throwing away the leaves and other natural debris, many people are recycling them back into the soil.
You can easily create an organic fertilizer by composting your yard debris with other forms of vegetation such as corn cobs, peat moss, hay and straw. Some farmers offer these things for little or nothing, most advertising "Free, you haul". Some homeowners place a bin in their backyard just for the purpose of adding their own leftover vegetables to the items that they pick up from others. There are even "natural" supplements that are available to add to these mixtures that are meant to increase the nutritional value. Some say that only this natural fertilization is best, while others will mix their "homemade" compound with a chemical fertilizer bought from the store.
If after fertilizing with organic, chemical, or a mixture of both, your lawn still isn't doing well, you may have to test the soil. A kit to do this can be bought from you local garden center. If your soil's PH levels are off, your fertilizing plan might need to be altered to include some additional ingredients. If your lawn is in a really bad state it may be time to call in a professional lawn care expert, at least for a consultation. The extra expense of getting help from someone who already knows what they are doing might be worth it if it saves your lawn. Having to completely re-plant or re-sod can be a lot more expensive and will definitely be more time consuming in the long run.
No matter what type of fertilizer you choose to use, whether it be organic, chemical or a mixture of both, the most important thing is that you do fertilize your lawn. Jiles makes this clear when he states, "Long grass isn't really much of a natural occurrence anyway. Long ago, there was tall prairie grass and things like that, but lawns are a relatively modern mankind of thing. That's a good enough reason to fertilize your lawn. Will a lawn live if you don't fertilize it? Yes. But if you want to have a nice looking lawn that is healthy and that sustains a good, growing grass, then you definitively need to at least fertilize."
