
20 Apr What Does Fertilizer Do for My EMPIRE Turf Lawn?
By the end of this article, you will learn either:
- how to fertilize your turf on your own or
- all the reasons you could ever want to justify hiring a lawn service to do it for you
Know your turf
The most important thing in turf care is knowing your turf. Different grasses require different care. A zoyisa grass like Empire Turf likes 15-0-15 fertilizer in the spring and an 8-0-16 in the fall.
Do you remember how to read a bag of fertilizer?
Empire Turf, for Example
We’ll break it down like this: timing, ratio, and rate.
Timing
Empire Turf will do best when it gets fertilized three times per year: spring, summer, and fall.
Ratio
Empire Turf prefers a 1-0-1 ratio of nutrients. So, when you are looking at purchasing fertilizer for your Empire Turf, you want the first number to match the last number, with a zero in the middle, like on this picture of a bag of 15-0-15 fertilizer. In the fall, we recommend you apply a 1-0-2 ratio fertilizer like an 8-0-16 to give the grass extra potassium or winter hibernation.
Rate
Empire prefers a rate of 3 pounds of nitrogen in total for the entire year.
So for each of the three feedings (spring, summer, and fall) you want to apply fertilizer at a rate of 1 pound of nitrogen in each feeding.
So how do I know how to do that?
Let’s go back to the picture of our bag of 15-0-15 fertilizer. That happens to be a 50-pound bag. As you saw in how to read a bag of fertilizer, the 15-0-15 means that the product contains 15% nitrogen, 0% phosphorous, and 15% potassium.
So, this bag of fertilizer contains 7.5 pounds of nitrogen (that’s 50 pounds times 15% (50 x .15 = 7.5). For an Empire Turf lawn, this bag would be enough fertilizer for 7,500 square feet.
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