How to Winterizing Your Lawns

With Winter fast approaching, it is important to prepare your lawn for the harsh months ahead. Winterizing your lawn helps to keep your grass and roots healthy during the cold weather and snow by providing your lawn with extra nutrients it will need.

There is some debate however about whether or not winterizing your lawn is necessary. So let’s start off by going over some tips to determine if you should.

Should you Winterize your lawn?

If you are not sure if you should apply a Winterizing Fertilizer to your lawn, the first step will be to perform a soil test. This will give you the results of the pH, Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium levels of your lawn. If the soil test determines that you have adequate Potassium levels, then you do not need to winterize.

If you’ve been feeding your lawn adequately all season with either organic/commercial fertilizer or compost, you’re lawn will still have more than enough nutrients stored to remain healthy during the winter. Mulching your grass is a great way to keep it fed all year long.

Type of grass to Winterize

Winterizier fertilizers are only meant for cool season grasses like, Kentucky blue grass, rye grass and fescues. Winterizers are not meant for warm season grasses, such as bahia grass, bermuda grass and centipede grass. These types of grass do not actively grow in the winter, and will not benefit from a winter/fall feeding. Save this for the spring.

How does Winterizing work?

When the Seasons change, so do your lawn’s nutrient requirements.

During the winter, your grass will need a little more help staying strong and healthy.

Winterizing Fertilizers are the right choice for this job because they are high in Potassium, which strengthens the grass from root to tip, and most importantly help it stand up against the cold and stress.

In addition to making your grass stronger, the Potassium also promotes increased nutrient absorption, aiding in optimizing your lawn care feeding plan.

Winterizing Fertilizer contains two other primary nutrients, Nitrogen and Phosphorus, which help to enhance root growth. You will find lesser amounts of these nutrients compared to early season Fertilizers, which have the primary function of thickening your lawn or “building turf”.

When to Winterize your Lawn

You should plan on applying Winterizing Fertilizer to your lawn in late October or early November.

In order get the most from winterizing lawn, you should make sure that you are also applying a fertilizer to your lawn around the beginning of September. This will help to stimulate root growth and prepare it for the season ahead.