GetSunday Lawn Care is a subscription service that delivers lawn fertilizers to your home as they are needed. Each delivery is selected for your lawn based on it’s size, your climate, your regional and local soil, and your grass type. What makes this a nice service however is not exactly the products they send you it’s that you won’t ever have any extra product sitting around taking up space in your garage or shed.
Before I get further into this review I want to first say right up front that I am a paying customer of the Sunday lawn care service. As of this writing I received two shipments in the 2020 lawn care season and two shipments so far in the 2021 lawn care season.
I have only used some of the products they’ve sent me however, not because it’s not good but because I’m not their target customer. I run a DIY lawn care website, the one you are reading now, and I run a popular DIY lawn care YouTube channel. I own lots of lawn and garden equipment and make lots of small applications to my lawn throughout the year using many unique products that Sunday doesn’t offer as well as other boutique products that would be excessive if used in tandem with all of the products Sunday sends me.
Now with that said I feel like I’m one of the best people out there to review the Sunday subscription service though because I understand how lawn fertilizers work so let’s dive in.
The Short Review: Who GetSunday Lawn Care Is Best For
If you physically own a backpack sprayer or hand-can sprayer and have used it before… and if you own a broadcast spreader and have used it before… and if you have the space to purchase and store bags and bottles of leftover lawn products in a garage or shed for use later in the season on in the following year… and you enjoy collecting and applying very specific products at specific times of the year to feed your lawn all season long… then this subscription service is NOT for you.
Here’s a “non-review” video I made a while back explaining more about who I don’t think would benefit from subscribing to this service:
The service is good for many people however. I am very happy with the service and the products they deliver to my home so long as I keep in mind what they offer compared to the convenience factor.
I think it’s a fair deal in terms of pricing and the fertilizers are incredibly easy to apply to a lawn but if you enjoy the process of cherry-picking products and spoon feeding a lawn then this just isn’t going to work for you.
You see when you sign up for the service you give them your address and they analyze your geographic area, weather patterns, and regional soil structure and grass types and then they send you pouches periodically that you connect to your hose and spray on your lawn without thought or question.
They do send you a soil test kit with your first delivery that you can fill with soil from your lawn and send back (if you wish). If you choose to do this extra step, they can use that data to further refine the products they send you but again this is an optional step than many choose to skip.
The thing is this program is not bad though. I know for a fact because of my work in the lean care education space that there are a ton of people out there that simply want to have a nice-looking lawn without learning anything about it and without having to go out and buy products or equipment. These are the people that are tempted to hire out lawn care maintenance to local companies, but they also don’t want to pay the high fees to have a nearby landscaping company come to their home routinely to apply fertilizers, so Sunday fulfills a gap in the industry nicely.
They allow you to get exactly what you need for your lawn with the least amount of effort for a very low cost compared to traditional lawn care service providers. You don’t need any equipment or expertise to apply the products to your lawn yourself so the barrier to lawn-owners is extremely low.
If you were to purchase products yourself individually you might save a little bit of money but you’d have to learn how to pick your products, dose your products, and then store leftover products making the penny-pinching practice of doing everything yourself seem less attractive.
Anyway, as an experienced lawn care educator I fully endorse this subscription plan but only to those that identify with the cohort of people I described above.
You don’t have to think about what to put on the lawn and you don’t need any equipment other than a regular garden hose to apply the products to your lawn.
Remember, some of the rest of this post may go over the heads of many readers and that’s OK. If you are considering Sunday then you are probably new to lawn care. In my experience the more you learn about how to tend to a lawn the more you enjoy diving in and cherry picking the products yourself. Just look at the product list I keep on this website.. I own and use almost all of the products listed on this page from time to time on various parts of my lawn and garden!
What Do You Get With A Sunday Lawn Subscription
Personally, I manually pick and choose products to apply to my lawn and I educate my readers here on the site as well as my viewers over on the Turf Mechanic YouTube channel how to do it all yourself, but I also subscribe to the Sunday subscription service to better understand what they offer and to actually use their products on parts of my property to see how the lawn responds to them.
Here is a video I put together showing exactly what came in my first Lawnbox shipment ever; if you are thinking about subscribing then this is similar to what they will send you on day one:
And this is the video I made for my Fall shipment, the last shipment I received in Fall 2020 during the fertilization season and winterization period for my then cool season lawn:
Analysis Of All of Sunday Lawn Care’s Nutrient Pouches
As of February 2021 Sunday lists 16 different nutrient pouches available on their website – each of which can be shipped to various customers at various times throughout the year based on what each of those individual customer needs at that time.
Sunday also claims to send up to 5 shipments per year to your home with customized products that are meant to be applied mainly at the times which they are delivered. So far I haven’t received that many shipments in a season but 3-4 should probably be expected at least.
First shipments come with a soil test kit that you can optionally fill with your lawn soil and return; I’ll go into this process further down the page; it’s very simple but first I wanted to summarize their product line complete with a brief table of product data.
The Sunday Nutrient Pouch List Includes The Following:
► Grass Machine 15-0-3 | 12% Urea Nitrogen + 0.1% Chelated Iron
► Green Out 0-0-5 | 0.3$ Chelated Iron + 0.13% Manganese + 0.07% Boron
► Iron Booster 15-0-0 | 12% Urea Nitrogen + 1.4% Chelated Iron
► Lawn Starter 8-16-8 | 5% Urea Nitrogen
► Lawn Strong 24-0-3 | 17.8% Urea Nitrogen + 0.1% Chelated Iron
► Lawn Vitality 15-0-3 | 10.7% Urea Nitrogen + 0.1% Chelated Iron
► Micro Boost 15-0-2 | 12% Urea Nitrogen + 0.4% Chelated Iron + 0.06% Boron + 0.13% Manganese + 0.08% Zinc
► Mighty Green 26-0-2 | 12.8% Urea Nitrogen
► Potassium Boost 0-0-20 | Includes Seaweed Extract
► Grass Powerhouse 24-0-3 | 18.58% Urea Nitrogen + 0.1% Chelated Iron
► Super S 15-0-4 | 12% Urea Nitrogen + 0.1% Chelated Iron + 2% Combined Sulphur + Beet Juice
► Heat Helper 15-0-2 | 11.5% Urea Nitrogen + Kelp Extract
► Heat Defense 12-0-4 | 8.4% Urea Nitrogen + Seaweed Extract
► Fall Fortify 22-0-0 | 16.7% Urea Nitrogen + 0.5% Chelated Iron + 1% Calcium
► Winter Prep 15-0-0 | 10.1% Urea Nitrogen + 1.5% Chelated Iron + 1% Calcium + 1% Magnesium
► Pet Patch 0-0-0 | Includes 0.1% Chelated Iron + 3% Calcium
You should notice from the list above that almost all of their products use urea nitrogen as their main source, remainders of nitrogen contents tend to be urea-triazone which is a slower acting version meant to add an extended release element to the product(s).
You should also note that all of their fertilizers pouches are liquids so every shipment you get will be spreadable by connecting the pouch to the end of your hose and walking through the lawn until the pouch is empty.
In addition to these pouches Sunday offers a few additional products that can be picked up on top of the regular subscription. You can get seed starting mix, seed patch repair kits for dead spots in the lawn that need to be reseeded, and a couple of different weed kill products.
Astute readers will note that Sunday doesn’t offer a weed pre-emergent nor do any of their products contain humic acids. In fact their micro-nutrient offerings are slim as well. Most of their products contain tiny amounts of Iron but aside from trace amounts of Manganese, Boron, Zinc, Calcium, and Magnesium there aren’t any other micros in their pouches… and depending on what pouches they send you throughout the year you may not even get a product that contains all of these nutrients.
I do appreciate that some of their products contain tiny amounts of seaweed or kelp extracts; these are what we call bio-stimulants that aren’t actually nutrients, but they stimulate the plants’ ability to use nutrients more efficiently for better growth, in this case root development with kelp extracts. Most however don’t contain any bio-stimulants and only high rates of Nitrogen compared to all other nutrients.
For that reason I believe Sunday fed lawns will look pretty good fairly quickly but won’t be as resilient year over-year compared to lawns that are fertilized using competitor Lawnbright’s custom lawn plan. Lawnbright is a low Nitrogrn plan that is heavy on bio-stimulants and minor nutirents. Their product line pushes healthy grass that doesn’t grow as fast and is more hardy throughout the year.
Here’s a quick video explaining why I like lawnbright for seed starting and adding base nutrients to the soil over Sunday:
The Main Nitrogen Source For Sunday Pouches
Another point to note is that urea is an acidifying fertilizer so if you use Sunday pouches only for a long period of time this will slowly acidify your soil. This can be a good thing for people that have high or neutral soil pH because almost all grass types perform best when soil is slightly low (6.5 is my target in my lawn) but if your soil is acidic to begin with acidifying fertilizers may push the pH level lower than you’d like over a long period of time.
I think it’s also important to bring up that almost all of the pouches (with the exception of the starter fertilizer pouch and the potassium boost pouch) are low in potassium. Potassium acts like the immune system in your lawn. It won’t make your lawn change color or grow faster but when your lawn does grow and it has access to adequate levels of potassium the growth is more healthy and the grass can protect itself better from high heat, lots of foot traffic, drought, and disease. In my lawn I apply liquid aeration products to my lawn regularly for their humic acid, potassium, and seaweed extracts.
When you apply products that contain molasses you are providing food for the beneficial microbes that live in your soil which can also help loosen compacted ground and mulch grass clippings back into the soil faster and more efficiently… but anyway this is getting me off topic.
What I do like is the hose end connect system that is provided with each delivery. Everyone has a garden hose on the side of the yard and with their hose-end system even the least prepared homeowner can still apply their products to the lawn in 5-10 minutes depending on the size of their yard.
An underrated benefit of this program is that by using their pouches you actually gain experience applying liquid products to the lawn from a hose end sprayer. This is important because their are many products out there that you can buy outside of the Sunday brand that come with hose-end applicators and many of them are worth buying for a variety of reason.
Dedicated and more comprehensive micro-nutrient products, water retention products, and humic acid products can be all purchased separately from other brands and applied via hose-end sprayers so GetSunday actually can prepare you for going deeper down the rabbit hole if you choose to do so later on.
Again, if you want to price this subscription service out use this affiliate link and code mechanic20 to drop the price by $20.
Now, with all of that said (to me it still seems like I’m skimming over the surface) I want to explain a bit about how Sunday’s soil test kit works and why it’s worth taking the time to complete this optional step.
How Get Sunday’s Soil Test Kit & Service Works
This section is still in draft mode.
Additional Notes On How Some Lawn Care Products Work
Sulphur or acidifying fertilizers (like ammonium sulphate or ammonium nitrate) are used to lower soil pH.
Slow release nitrogen sources are less likely to leach and become water pollution. These include coated products of urea (Sulphur coated or polymer coated), which are a type of synthetic organic fertilizer.
Water soluble sources of nitrogen are quickly available to plants. They are usually made of salts and can burn grass if not used carefully.
These can easily leech beyond the root zone of plants and contaminate ground water supplies. Some examples of water soluble nitrogen ferts include calcium nitrate, ammonium sulphate, ammoniated phosphates, calcium nitrate, and potassium nitrate.
Organic ferts include things like corn gluten meal, bio-solids, feather meal, and composted manure – each of which breaks down slowly in warmer temps when microbial activity on a lawn is greater.
