If you love a green lawn, learning the exact times to fertilize the lawn can make a big difference in how green it gets and how long it stays green.
Just like us, humans are healthier when we get good nutrition from a balanced diet, regularly feeding your lawn with the right nutrients helps to strengthen the root system to spur root growth and help your lawn actively grow throughout the season.
A Tips to Properly Fertilize Your Lawn
Fertilizing your lawn also helps to reduce how much lawn care and maintenance you need to do. It not only helps your lawn grow, which reduces the need for seeding, but a healthy lawn also keeps weed growth to a minimum.
The following are the best times of year to fertilize your lawn as part of an ongoing lawn care program. You should always use a broadcast spreader to apply the fertilizer evenly across your lawn according to the recommendations on the fertilizer packaging.
- Early Spring – As the first “feeding” of the year, this is like breakfast for your lawn. The exact timing varies every year, depending on the weather. But, once the ground has thawed and there is no real chance for it to refreeze, you can plan to apply fertilizer. This is usually sometime in March or April in Toronto and the GTA.
- Late Spring – Your grass is probably growing and using energy more now than at any other time of year. Apply fertilizer in May or June, about six to eight weeks following the first application.
- Summer – Most summers are very stressful for your lawn. Not only are temperatures higher, and rainfall lower, but you may be using your lawn more too.
Apply a summer fertilizer sometime between late June and early August, again, six to eight weeks from the previous feeding. - Fall – Every lawn feeding is important, but this is the one that is arguably the most important of all. Fertilizing in the fall gives your lawn the nutrients it needs to recover from the stress of summer, prepare for winter dormancy, and emerge greener than ever next spring.
Use fall fertilizer once between late August and early November, or about six to eight weeks after the last application.
If you enjoyed this post, check out our article “Lawn Maintenance Tips For A Healthy Landscape”.
