Fertilising the Lawn - but avoiding flower beds

Hi everyone,

I recently moved into a new house and have my first garden to attend to! Luckily, it was already in decent shape and relatively small, so there isn't too much work to do, but I want to try and maintain it as best I can.

I was thinking of putting down some weed & feed for the spring, but I'm afraid of putting too much down so I was going to use a spreader. However, I don't want to get the fertiliser on all flower beds.

Do you all have any tips or tricks to making sure that you get an even coating, but also putting it on accurately?

Thanks in advance.

 

Put the weed and feed into a watering can, fit the rose (the holey bit) to the sticky out bit, pick up the can by the bendy over bit tilt the watering can and move back and forth in lines over the lawn leaving an imaginary line where you had 'watered' to, when you are coming up to a flowerbed

slam it in reverse! :WINK1:

Easy Peasy Cheers, Tony.

 

I use a seeder and a spreader. The spreader is much quicker as it chucks it out about 8 mower-widths wide. That's fine for Nitrogen, if some goes on the beds it doesn't matter, but no good for Weed & Feed, and I use the (slower) grass seed sower for that.

Seeder:



Spreader / chucker:



Get an old plastic bag (multi-purpose compost bag, or similarly large bag). Cut it open to make a "ground sheet" (or use a ground-sheet if you have one, Natch!)

Fill the hopper with fertilizer / Weed and Feed (or grass seed, whatever job you are doing)

Measure a length of the ground sheet carefully. If you can do exactly a 1 Metre length that will make the maths easier

Start the spreader at one end, carefully (as you can) aligned and push the other end of the ground sheet.

Repeat 10 times

If you have not got much "stuff" down then either open the holes up wider and start again or, if not adjustable, run over it another 10 times.

Carefully tip the stuff off the groundsheet into a container and weight it. (And then weigh the container, empty, and subtract that)

Do the maths to work out how much per Square Metre that was.

Then work out how much you actually need to apply, based on the application rate on the chemical's instructions.

Probably off down the pub to recover at this point would be a good choice! Write the answer down before you go though ...

So lets say you need 4 passes to get the amount-per-square-metre that the chemical requires. Do one pass in each direction (twice) to get the total of four passes. You want at least two passes, at right-angles to each other, to compensate for wheel tracks and going slightly off-course etc. If you have four passes then I recommend that the two in each direction are half-a-width offset, so you get better coverage.

You also need to be sure that when you actually run on the lawn you will be able to see where you have been (including on your fourth pass, if you need one, when there are footprints and tracks all over the place); its worth doing trial, the first time, with the spreader empty so you can see what sort of tracks, if any, that it leaves. My seed-spreader is the same width as my mower, and I mow "stripes" on my lawn, so that's easy, but you may find that you need something more than just the wheel tracks (which may not be very easy to see on the grass).

I put a bucket at each end of the row. When I get to the end of a row I move that bucket to where I will come back on the next "return" pass (so one further over than the row I am just about to make). Then I use the bucket at the far end as a target / reminder of where I have got to.

 

Thanks Kristen. That's a lot more helpful than what I've been reading on some sites.

When using the spreader though, how do you avoid getting stuff into the flower beds? I'm thinking of sticking in a small herb garden in one corner and I don't want to get it all over what will (hopefully) end up in my food!

 

The other sites probably know what they are taking about though

You can't. If I'm putting on something that will kill the plants I don't use the spreader/chucker, I use the Seeder instead (when using the "seeder" the "stuff" just drops out of holes in the bottom of the hopper as the wheels turn, so it puts it exactly underneath, unlike the "Chucker" which flings it in a strip several metres wide.)

I think the outcome would be worse than that, I think Weed and Feed would kill your herbs :(

Chucking a bit of extra lawn fertilizer (i.e. NOT including a weed-killer) onto the herb bed won't matter for an eating-it-later perspective - although some herbs prefer to be grown in poor soils, and chucking fertilizer on them is probably not the right sort of husbandry.

If you are "organic" then I hear you, but I have a difference stance which is more a case of "known provenance". Life is full of chemicals, including organic gardening; its all chemistry, so its a question of deciding which chemicals are more risky - such as recently invented complex compounds created in a Pharma laboratory which also has a major stock-investor "profit" balancing act to do. Some Nitrogen and trace elements is, in my opinion, not going to make a difference to the herbs you harvest a few days later. But if your views on that are different I'm happy to respect them. Just stick with the (slower) "seeder" rather than using a "spreader / chucker" - for a small lawn it makes no odds, for my lawn (which is big) it would take far too long.