I’m interrupted nearly every time I’m out working in the yard…and that’s nearly every day.
Dog walkers, neighbors, and even drivers stop their cars stop on the side of the road to ask me about my lawn or sometimes compliment me on how it looks.
Many of them ask questions about what I’m doing or what grass I’m growing.
Some ask about the stuff I put on the lawn.
Overwhelmingly however, the first question nearly everyone asks me after breaking the ice with friendly chit chat is, “so, what is the best fertilizer to put on the lawn”.
No joke, I literally get asked this in-person by almost everybody that stops to talk to me about my lawn.
In the online world the question also gets asked a ton.
People email me regularly about it. In my consultations my clients almost always include a question or two about what fertilizer they should use, and hundreds of people ask me for fertilizer advice or recommendations on my YouTube videos.
In many cases (not all) the person asking the questions expects me to give a straight-forward answer. They expect a definitive product as, “the best one”.
The trouble is however, that there isn’t a best lawn fertilizer at all. It seriously depends on a lot of factors.
It depends on more factors than most people can think of.
I want to go into ALL of those factors here on this blog post. This will be a very in-depth resource. I hope you’ll take the time to read all if not most of it because I know you’ll learn a thing or two.
Most review articles like this just hand readers a list of 7-10 common products that they simply say are best.
Virtually every article on the web monetizes that list with affiliate links, usually, and occasionally paid placement…like an in-line ad.
We all know this happens. Nobody likes it, but everyone seems to tolerate it.
In my business my biggest goal is to genuinely help you learn something new, learn the reasoning behind the processes and products we use, and understand how to judge the best products to buy for your own personalized set of circumstances.
That’s the main reason why people book consultations with me all the time; my advice can be far less biased.
Having said that to start off this article I’d like to list the main fertilizers I use on my lawn all the time. For each I’ll provide a link to the product that may or may not generate compensation for me, but I will at least give you a brief description why I use that product and under what circumstances I’m most likely to use that product.
I also want you to know that there will be plenty of links in this article that point to other sections of this article. Please use the links to bounce around as I think it will really help your understanding of points that are more specific to your own yard and circumstances.
These are the best lawn fertilizers that I have ever tried, reviewed, or researched.
For those reasons these are the fertilizers I currently use most often.
1. Granulized Alfalfa Meal (2.5-0.5-2.5) – I tend to buy large 40 lb bags of Alfalfa Meal from Down To Earth. I used to buy this locally from a garden supply store that was just down the street from where I lived but now that we moved from Oregon where this stuff is made to Southern California I have to ship it in via Amazon or use a different brand that only sells smaller bags at a local nursey that’s 10 miles away.
Alfalfa meal is one of the main fertilizers I use because it is so high in Organic Matter (OM) and provides just as much naturally occurring Potassium as it does Nitrogen.
Because it is plant based it won’t burn, improves the soil structure, and adds many amino acids that are beneficial to the grasses growing and the beneficial bacteria that live in the soil under your turf.
Alfalfa meal also naturally contains something called Triacontanol in it. Triacontinol is a chemical that all plants produce at various quantities that acts to direct plant growth underground.
In short, the more Triacontinol in the ground the larger and healthier your lawns root mass becomes…and of course the better the foundation of your lawn is the healthier the top growth is.
Because you would need a ton of Alfalfa meal to fully fertilize your lawn annualy with the proper amount of NPK I supplement with other products.
2. Total Lawn Fish Hydrolysate (2-4-1) & Total Lawn Phosphorus Free (20-0-10) – These are two different product made by Lawnbright. They are liquid sprayables so they aren’t going to increase your OM but they don’t require any equipment to apply either.
These products come with a hose attachment so all you need to do is connect the product to your hose and then turf the spigot on to spray the lawn.
The application of this product is not going to be perfectly precise because you are walking the lawn with a hose but because Total Lawn’s ingredients are low on the salt index you are unlikely to have to even worry about over applying to your yard.
The reason I use these products is because Lawnbright chose to use a fish hydrolysate instead of an emulsion. Emulsions are kind of like cooking up a fish and then sticking it in a blender whereas the hydrolysate is a more complete product that is made without “cooking” the fish. This preserves much of the bacteria, proteins, acids, minerals, etc that would otherwise be lost.
It also doesn’t smell fishy which some would also consider to be a very good thing.
Because the hydrolysate is low in NPK the product won’t push fast growth or any extra growth that is unnecessary. In my opinion fertilizing a lawn is all about making it as healthy is possible, not about making it grow as fast as possible.
I like mowing the lawn but even I don’t want to do it any more than I have to.
