Why I Oughta...

Back at the end of February, I posted my 2023 lawn care plan that included applications of both organic and synthetic fertilizers across the growing season . 5 feeding applications in total.  The first...was slated to be an early feeding that was combined with a pre-emergent.  I've gone back and forth with early Spring fertilizers over the years - doing it sometimes and skipping it others.  Why skip it?  Because, I don't want to have to mow.  But, buying pre-emergent WITHOUT fertilizer is hard-to-do around here, so this year, I went with the combo.   As for the timing, the GDD calendar tells you when to apply .  Here's the screenshot from today, showing that our Zone/Zip Code is in the the "Optimum" category this week.  Yesterday, I went out and applied two bags of this synthetic combo from Menards that comes from Forever Green.  I posted about the new Menards organic biosolids product from Forever Green earlier this year .   B...

I saw this bag of Lesco 19-0-7 lawn fertilizer with pre-emergent at one of the big box stores recently and thought it was worth tracking here for both price and N-P-K makeup.  For reference, Milorganite has a 6-4-0 N-P-K and based on what I've both read/watched and my initial soil testing, finding something like this that has a # in the Potassium part of the equation is, inherently interesting to me.  At $68 a bag, it is a little bit LESS interesting, though. This post and photo, however...reminds me that I NEED to keep an eye on my 2022 lawn care schedule as I'm planning on making some changes to the treatments this year - especially as I try to balance my historical heavy N-P's in the N-P-K analysis.

In March, I shared the bag of Halts (no lawn food) that I had secured before Amazon started to slow down their shipping during the pandemic and referenced the Michigan State University Growing Degree Days tracker .  Welp...today is the day:  we're right in the middle of the "Optimum" range so it is time to put down that pre-emergent.  You can see where April 2nd lines up in the screenshot above. My bag of grassy weed pre-emergent that I have from Scott's covers just 5k square feet.  I have about 15K square feet of turf, so this covers just part of my lawn - and I've been focused on the very far back 5k square feet.  That's where I applied this year's batch .  I'm trying to set a reminder for myself that I should throw down another round of this stuff in the Fall to take on the Poa that I think is taking over parts of my lawn.  I went back to my ratty Scott's Edgeguard spreader for this job of what reminds me of cracked corn: I'll be...

Nat added this bag that you see at the top of this post to one of her recent orders from Amazon.  It is a bag of Scott's Crabgrass and Grassy Weed Preventer under the "Halts" product name.  It does NOT have lawn food in it - which is fairly uncommon in most crabgrass preventers. You can find this stuff here at Amazon (this is NOT an affiliate link.  I don't do that...) for $16.99. I used this same product last year - and sought it out because of the fact that it doesn't have lawn food in the mix.  Last year, I held off on feeding my lawn until Memorial Day and I'm thinking that I'm going to do the same. I laid out my full 2020 lawn care plan here in this post from February .  In that post , you'll note that I'm calling for an application of this pre-emergent in "April" versus "mid-April".  And that's because that I'm going to turn to - once again - Michigan State University and their "Growing Degree Days...