Ever wonder how much fertilizer your lawn truly needs? Allyn Hane, “The Lawn Care Nut,” draws on his 15+ years of professional lawn care experience to explain how to get the measurements you need to answer this question.
The Importance of Measuring Your Lawn
“One of the most common questions that I get asked these days, especially in the spring, is, ‘Allyn, how much fertilizer do I put on the lawn?’ And in today’s Toro Yard Hack, I’m going to give you the first step to answering that question by throwing a question back at you. And that is, how big is your lawn? You see, because any product that you apply to your lawn is going to have a label. And the label’s going to have instructions that tell you the application rates for your particular situation. And that’s why knowing your square footage, or your lawn size, is so important, because that’s the first step to understanding how much you need to put down.”
Break Your Yard into Sections
“Okay, so now the first thing I recommend you do is to break your lawn down into logical sections. Sections that you can kind of manage, and that will make things a little bit easier for you when you’re doing your calculations. You should also then print an aerial view of your house and literally map it out. Now at this point, you need to get the area, or square footage, of each of your sections and transfer them down here on your map. Now you’ve got two ways you can do this.”
Choose Your Strategy for Measuring
- You can do this the old fashioned way, which is to break out a long tape, a measuring wheel, or, even in the case that I’m doing here, a twenty-five foot tape measure, and literally measure each area out in the lawn, record it here on your map, and come back in and do your calculations.
- Or, the easier way and probably the more modern way, is to use online tools, like you see here, that are going to allow you to do something very similar by outlining areas of the lawn and then they’ll give you the area automatically calculated. In the end, what you should have is a nice, sectioned map that tells you how big each area of your lawn is, and then a total square footage at the end. Keep in mind that rounding up or down to the nearest one-hundred is just fine. And now that you have a proper map with measurements of each area of your lawn and a total, you should feel more confident in applying lawn applications knowing that your better following the labelled rates.
Additionally, knowing your lawn size can help you choose the right lawn mower for your situation. Do you need a smaller deck? Or a wider one that’s going to cut more area a lot quicker? For me, of course, the more I get to mow, the better.
For Toro, I’m Allyn Hane, The Lawn Care Nut. As always, thanks for watching and I’ll see you in the lawn.”
