The fertilizer use act was signed into law so that everyone,
including residential homeowners can do their part in saving the Chesapeake Bay.
This form will let you know how to measure your lawn,
find out what's in your fertilizer and how to make your application rates so
that you can reduce your nutrient use and make sure that your turf is still
healthy enough to keep your lawn green and keep the Chesapeake Bay clean.
When you, you're going to go ahead and put fertilizer on your lawn,
you do really want to know what is in your soil and you can't just get,
so what you need to do is take a soil test that is not a difficult thing.
All you need to do is have a shovel and it's always good to have a plastic
container. It doesn't have to be a pail.
It can be any kind of plastic container.
The reason why you want to use a plastic container is that your shovel is metal
and metal against metal would be bad. The other thing you need to do is,
is have some type of a container to put the soil back in.
This is one of the the lawn sample bags that we have available.
But a plain old baggy would work just fine too.
So what you do is you find a nice spot in the lawn. You step into it,
there you go. And then you get a sample of soil.
Now your sample of soil only has to be maybe about two to three inches deep.
Is that something like that? And you just put this in the container.
The first thing you want to do though is you want to make sure that you don't
have the grass here.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to put this on the lawn and take the grass
off. By taking the grass off, you're taking off all the
organic matter on it.
So what you're doing instead is you're just getting an actual soil sample.
Normally you'd want to take about 10 to 15 soil samples.
Since this is just for demonstration, we're only going to do a couple.
And like I said, you don't have to go that deep.
Your you want to get as deep as you can for the roots,
but three to four inches, we'll probably be fine. Again, we'll,
I'll take this off. Here you go.
And then you put all your samples in the bucket and you stir them up and you can
use your sample for that
and you mix it all together and then you get your soil sample bag and you put
about a cup of the soil into the bag,
label it so you know where you got it. Like for instance,
if you're doing more than your front yard,
if you're doing your front yard and backyard,
you might want to go ahead and label them front yard and backyard.
If you're doing your neighbor's yard,
make sure they pay for it and label it neighbor's yard.
So you just go ahead and fill this up to about a cup.
It's a good idea if your soil is wet to put it on some newspaper and let it dry
overnight. The reason why you'd want to do that is first of all,
wet soil is heavier, dry soils, lighter.
It's cheaper and you don't have to wait for it to dry when it gets to the lab.
If you have an email address,
you'll get the information from the lab within two to three days. Perfect.
And at that point you can go ahead and see how much fertilizer and how much lyme
you need to add to make your soil and your lawn be perfect.
So now you have your soil sample and you wondering where you're supposed to send
it.
University of Maryland extension with home and garden information center has a
wonderful website that will give you all the information of the different
varieties of soil test labs that are available for Maryland residents to use.
All you have to do, find the one that you want, send it off.
These are examples of some typical homeowner-style fertilizer applicators.
Your traditional drop spreader and a cyclone or a broadcast spreader that is
utilized to apply lawn fertilizers.
After we've done our soil test and we know what we'd like to apply we purchased
a commercial fertilizer. This is a phosphorus free or a phosphate free.
The middle number is zero.
So what I've done is I've taken this product and I've equally distributed it
into two different buckets. So I have half in each bucket.
And by doing that I'm going to then look at what the size of my yard is.
The fertilizer bag provides me a very nice model explanation on how I can
determine how many thousand square foot of my yard and then that'll tell me how
much fertilizer I have to apply.
I am also provided settings for my individual fertilizer spreaders.
This spreader is designed to have a four setting,
so I would turn the dial to the number four.
I would make sure the gate is closed prior to loading and with the fertilizer.
Then I would fill the topper with the fertilizer and I would go into my
pre-marked area,
which is going to help me determine whether my calibration is about right.
The calibration would be the setting that they provided me versus how much is
actually going out on the lawn. When applying fertilizer,
it's very important to determine the effective swath width.
And what this allows us to do is look at how far the fertilizer particles are
thrown from the broadcast spreader. In the professional industry,
we most often spread wheel track the wheel track.
So my first pass down is fine. My second pass,
I want the fertilizer particles coming out of the spreader to be thrown to the
last set of wheel tracks, the outside wheel track.
And that means I'm going to have a nice even coverage.
Go ahead and spread and I would have that pre-measured area and then I would
know whether I was over applying under applying or hopefully being right on
target so that I'm getting the appropriate amount of nitrogen onto the lawn.
And so I ended up with a nice green lawn that's going to be healthy,
but I'm not fertilizing the Chesapeake Bay.