Every homeowner knows that there are two absolutely essential chores to maintaining a lush-looking, healthy lawn: irrigating and fertilizing. Every homeowner also knows that fertilizing can be a real pain: buying the expensive fertilizer, hauling the heavy bags home, schlepping back and forth endlessly behind a fertilizer-spraying gizmo that frequently chokes on chunks of fertilizer. Not exactly anyone’s idea of fun.
And for homeowners that don’t enjoy the benefits of an automated sprinkler system, the irrigation chore isn’t exactly all fun-and-games either. That chore involves dragging hoses all over creation, constantly repositioning sprinklers – and of course, the always delightful occasional blast of water in the face when you try to move sprinklers without turning the water off.
But now there’s a way to make both chores vastly easier and more efficient. And it’s better for you, it’s better for your lawn, it’s even better for the environment. It’s called fertigation.
The Benefits of Fertigation
Fertigation involves injecting liquid nutrients into water as it goes through an automated sprinkler system. Every time the lawn is watered, it is also fed. But instead of dumping a huge of amount of fertilizer on the lawn a few times per year, as happens with traditional fertilization methods, fertigation feeds your lawn in dainty little morsels.
In human terms, it might be akin to switching from one gargantuan meal per week to the normal three meals per day. And just as frequent meals are healthier for humans than the occasional mega-meal, it seems pretty obvious that light, constant feedings would be better for your grass than the occasional mega-force-feed. Indeed, many studies have shown that plant health is drastically improved with fertigation compared to traditional fertilization.
But fertigation also offers a big benefit to the environment. Those big semi-annual dumps of fertilizer that result from the traditional method of fertilizing yards? A huge chunk of that fertilizer is wasted.
Plants can only choke down so many nutrients at once. And nutrients that aren’t used don’t remain in the root zone of the plants indefinitely. Rain and irrigation eventually wash those unused nutrients away – into groundwater reservoirs, streams, ponds, lakes and oceans, where they cause great environmental damage.
But with fertigation, a tiny amount of food is fed to the plants with each irrigation cycle. The amount of fertilizer delivered to the root zone is only what the plant can use now. Fertilizer waste and runoff, and the environmental harm that results, is virtually eliminated.
So switching to fertigation for feeding your lawn grass will certainly make your life a lot easier. But the environmental benefits of making that switch will also help to make everyone’s life a little better.
Fertigation is Great, But There’s a Catch…
Now that you’ve learned of the benefits of fertigation, you’ll likely agree that combining the chores of irrigation and fertilization is the way to go. Your lawn will look better, be healthier, and you’ll be doing the environment a huge favor. It’ll be a lot easier on you, too.
But as so often seems to be the case, there is a catch. If you don’t have an automated sprinkler system involved, the wonderful benefits of fertigation are just pie-in-the-sky dreaming. Because trying to fertigate with hoses and sprinklers that you drag around manually would be flirting with disaster. You just can’t get the precision needed that way for fertigation to work properly.
So if the idea of fertigation intrigues you, your first step is to give us a call to see about installing an automated sprinkler system on your property. Once your system is installed, adding a fertigation unit will be a possibility. You’ll be ready to reap the benefits of combining those oft-despised chores of fertilizing and irrigating.
And even if you never go ahead and make the move to fertigation, at least one of those miserable chores will have become infinitely easier.