Lime For Lawns
We weed, feed, and seed our lawns, occasionally with unsatisfactory results that leave us annoyed with yellow areas and inadequate development. Our dream is a rich green grass underfoot all during the growing season. Plus it offers the ideal background for social occasions and meaningful family time; nothing compares to the appearance or feel of a well-kept lawn.
The never-ending search for the ideal green lawn goes on for any individual who owns grass as nobody likes to play games on a rough, spotty and discolored lawn. Maintaining a lovely yard goes beyond just cutting and sporadically spraying a few weeds. The difference may come from lime treatment to your lawn.
Many homeowners find great significance in the search for healthy green grass. Though we hardly have time at home to distribute seeds and hope for the best, we see enticing green blades everywhere and get jealous of them. Those immaculate lawns you see may inspire jealousy, but most likely, they follow a strict maintenance program with frequent intervals of the following actions for optimal lawn care:
Usually leaving the grass to nature, the lawn caretaker could venture to treat for weeds or fertilize but may or may not require some assistance.
Although dolomitic limestone is a vastly underused and underappreciated technique, awareness of it on lawns expands as neighbors trade tips or generations pass on methods. Not many people know that liming your lawn may address many yard problems, not just for grass but also in your landscaping, garden, and flower beds. This is the reason we are driven to provide information on lime for lawns and enable customers to control their grass and reach the yard of their dreams by using the correct lime treatment methods.
What Does Lime Do for Grass?
The application of lawn lime neutralizes the soil’s acidity and alkalinity, restoring its pH equilibrium. You are giving your grass something it needs; hence, you might consider it an antacid. Applying limestone helps restore the PH level to a natural equilibrium, thereby enabling grass to flourish even if lawn fertilization causes the lawn’s PH to become acidic. Lime does, however, provide more advantages for lawns beyond PH balancing.
Lime for the lawn offers grass several advantages:
- Adjusts the pH level, also known as the acidity or alkalinity
- Lime for lawns provides the calcium and magnesium required for grass to flourish and withstand periods of stress like severe heat, drought, or too much or too little rain.
- Helps with either fresh sod, new seeds, or existing yards.
- Liming your grass helps other microorganisms in the ground that are required for a natural balance and supplies nutrients in the soil, often Lacking for improved soil health.
- Promotes thatches to break down environmental variables’ effects on soil
- Increases pesticide and fertilizer’s efficacy.
- Applies quickly and efficiently.
- Develops robust roots for endurance and long-lasting beauty.
Should I Put Lime on My Lawn?
You never know what Mother Nature will do, especially when the topography might change by the mile with woods, mountains, plains, rivers, and unusual regional weather patterns. Factors influencing your soil’s pH equilibrium consist in:
- In pollution
- Rainfall acid
- In fertilizers
- Regarding land use
- Insecticides
- Pine needles falling
- Total rain
- Degree of decomposing material in the ground
- What type of soil is it?
Without a test, it is impossible to determine how much nutrients seep from the soil and how often they leach since everyone’s circumstances are somewhat unique.
What You Need to Know About Lime Before Applying to Your Lawn
Ground limestone is a rock mostly composed of calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate. Dolomite lime for lawns is limestone, a rock created mainly by accumulating organic remnants such as shells or coral. If you have investigated lime at all, you have most likely come across various varieties, some of which are caustic and dangerous to handle:
- Agricultural burned (hazard)
- Calcitic dolomitic
- hydrated (hazard)
- Slaked or water added for cement, plasters, or mortars.
Ground dolomite lime is for lawns, and about all of the lime is marketed for use on lawns. Found in limestone, dolomite is a mineral high in calcium-magnesium carbonate, resulting in dolomitic lime rich in calcium and magnesium. Calcitic limestone is less nutrient-rich than dolomitic lime, even if it is rich in calcium carbonate; it contains far less magnesium.
The lime’s basic goal is for the carbonates to bond with the soil particles. Turfgrass absorbs several minerals; as the soil pH falls below around 6, other essential plant nutrients become less available.Apart from calcium and magnesium, such minerals consist of the following:
- Molybdenum
- nitrogen
- phosphorous
- potassium
- sulfur
Lawns’ quality lime differs depending on where you live; so, you may find out its effective neutralizing value. Seek a lawn lime with a neutralizing value higher than 80 percent, such Baker Lime starting at 89 percent, since the lower that value the more lime you will need to apply.
Usually offered either as powder or pellets, Dolomitic lime for lawns is exactly that—a powder of fine consistency fit for working into the ground. When the yard is irrigated or there is a reasonable amount of rain, the pellets settle on the ground and then break into the soil. Because the powder can be difficult to handle, hard to distribute, and can fly away quickly or create a cloud of dirty dust, many people swear by limestone pellets.
What is The Limestone For Lawn Treatment?
Lime treatment for lawn maintenance can truly assist counteract the impacts of harmful components present in grass, including aluminum, iron and manganese. The calcium especially has a kind of moderating influence on other soil minerals like copper, phosphorus and zinc, all of which can have negative effects and stop development.
A lime lawn treatment is used in several businesses, organizations, and individuals across:
- Agriculture
- Recreation or athletic fields
- Golf courses
- Residential
- Landscape
- Commercial and retail business
- Government
- Lawn maintenance
- Contractors
- Equestrian
- Fruit growers
- Turf farmers
How Can I Tell if My Lawn Needs Lime?
Though it’s preferable to get your soil analyzed, symptoms you could require lime for the lawn could be weeds, patchiness, discoloration, or poor growth. Once you do a soil test, you will know the precise acidity level and can design the best course of action. It is a straightforward operation.
Although there are various homemade techniques for evaluating soil, your county extension or land services office is the most accurate and dependable source. If your state’s university system boasts an agricultural lab, you can usually obtain the tests from there, as well as garden centers. They are free occasionally, but the cost may be as little as $10.
To find out whether you need lime for your lawn, you may also complete the test online and by mail by sending in a sample. Usually, soil testing companies will provide you with the findings straight forward. An actual soil test will provide you with more authority to create the ideal, rich, green lawn you want, as well as greater trust in your findings.
States with cold winters usually find lawn grasses performing well, with a soil PH level of roughly 6.5 to 6.8. On a 0-14 scale, the pH values indicate acidity/alkalinity; low pH numbers indicate objects high in acid content, including vinegar or lemon juice.
Additionally revealed by a proper soil test are calcium and magnesium levels. This knowledge can help you choose between the more calcium-rich calcitic lime or the most often used dolomitic lime including magnesium.
While some claim you cannot apply too much lime to the grass, others contend it can happen, and that correction is difficult if it does. Indeed, too much lime is conceivable. Hence, a good guide is an accurate, cheap soil test. The findings will indicate your ideal lime application dosage and provide your best protection against inadvertent injury.
When to Add Lime to Your Lawn, and How Much Lime Do I Apply To My Lawn?
Lime for your grass goes perfectly with everything else you do outside to get ready for summer or winter. Many argue that fall is the ideal time to lime lawns since it allows the lime to work the longest period into the ground before the growing season, therefore optimizing the soil conditions.
Although experts say you can apply lime anywhere on your lawn, it is best in the spring and fall seasons and the morning or evening hours. You may also question whether you combine lime and fertilizer. Although experts advise against using lime at the same time as fertilizer, they also state that a milder starting fertilizer is acceptable when you apply lime and grass seed to cover uneven areas. If you want to use lime and fertilizer together, exercise caution. According to the planting specialists, grass seed should ideally be planted between 65 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
Lime for lawns is measured in pounds per 1,000 square feet (one acre is 43,560 square feet). For 1,000 square feet of grass area, you wish to treat, for instance, a hypothetical yet typical treatment would be 40 pounds of pelletized limestone.
Your soil test’s pH level is a great indicator of how much lime your lawn requires. To help understand the soil test figures and order the right amount of lime for your yard size, you may also contact your local Baker Lime specialist.
Usually, lime packs weigh forty- or fifty- pounds. Views on the frequency of application vary from every few months or year to once every three or five years. Your circumstances will determine when to lime your lawn. Knowledge of what is in your soil and how it changes with the seasons is your greatest weapon. Lime, for instance, needs more frequent application than a yard with stickier, clay-based soil and will drain through a sandy, contaminated lawn.
Because lime runs through sandy ground too rapidly, particularly with heavy rain, and doesn’t mix sufficiently into clay-based soil, every type of soil poses a different issue. Adding organic matter like aged manure, completed compost, or chopped pine bark will help to enhance the texture of the soil. These products allow the lime to work faster into the ground and perform its tasks.
How to Apply Lime to a Lawn?
The size and texture of the lime you select will determine how you distribute or apply it to your lawn. While most agree that the powdered form of lime is more challenging, one can apply it with just a coffee can. Alternatively, you might substitute pelletized lime for your lawn. Liquid lime should not be used on lawns since it will not provide enough lime to maintain the good conditioning of your soil.
How best should lime be applied to your lawn? Among the numerous available equipment choices are a rotary, drop, and broadcast spreader. Without significant clogging or clumping, a rotary spreader most likely provides the best and most constant application. While some claim a drop spreader is less than perfect, others find it suitable. The lime you purchase and the amount of grass you need to cover will determine how you apply it.
People often employ all kinds of spreaders, home-rigged machines, buckets, cans, or sifters to get the lime onto the grass. You could rig a tool or own one that will do the task, but you could also investigate leasing the appropriate tools to apply lime or calling a contractor to handle it. See the Baker Lime team if you have questions regarding the lime application process or how to lime a yard!
As the creativity of the property owner permits, lawn treatment of dolomitic lime can be done in various ways. Any way you handle it, attempt to use a crisscross pattern as you move it over the yard for the best lime application; stay away from lime application on a windy day.
If you lime your grass or other garden plants, take care to avoid certain regions; some plants flourish in acidic soil of 5.5 pH or below.
- Azaleas beech trees
- Begonias: Blueberries
- CaladiumDogwood trees
- Gardenia Ferns
- Holly persons
- Pin Oak Tree
- Tree from Willow Oak
While many advise putting the lime first to give it time to work, you can seed and apply lime simultaneously.
Regarding time, one naturally wants to see changes immediately. Recall that lime is not a quick fix for gratifying needs. Though it pays off well into the future, it’s more like an investment in your lawn’s long-term beauty and health.
There is no “fast-acting” lime for grass; lime will take at least many months to adequately mix into the soil and produce the proper balance of plant nutrients. It might take a growing season or two—or perhaps three to see notable progress. Regular lime treatment can guarantee ongoing resilience for your grass.
