hey this Jason Creon you're watching online care life today I want to talk to you about fertilizer in particular how to fertilize a Bermuda lawn now I'm not gonna actually show you how to push a spreader or that sort of thing but we're going to talk about the fertilizer that I use and how to understand how much fertilizer you should be applying to your lawn stay tuned you know in the lawn care business and home owners alike want their grass green as much as possible typically so for us in the south we have warm season grasses that go dormant in the winter and when it gets springtime a lot of times people want you to start fertilizing and you know in particular when it gets April of May and the weather starts getting warm here in Alabama we want to get the fertilizer down and get that grass green so I'm talking about Bermuda lawn and I want to show you the fertilizer I'm using I was going start with that so I buy my fertilizer from company called harrell's now they have a fertilizer plant and they cover a lot of the you know area a lot of the local lawn care companies use harrell's this particular blend is a 3806 blend now in this video we're gonna focus primarily on that first number being the nitrogen content of this bag of fertilizer 38 meaning that it is 38 percent nitrogen in this 50-pound bag so if you want it for a visual here you got a lot of green pellets and some white pellets mixed in I'm spreading in here with my ground logic right on spreader alright so 3806 so let's talk about fertilizing your Bermuda lawn what happens to me sometimes the lawn care business is it'll get you know March April and people want their grass green the problem is sometimes it's still going down in the 30s at night and just to be honest we the Bermuda is not going to be green at that time well when the weather starts warming up and that's when we start fertilizing okay so let's talk specifically about a Bermuda lawn how much fertilizer should you put on your Bermuda lawn well for me I'm trying to put out around 2.2 pounds of nitrogen per thousand square feet okay let's say it again 2.2 pounds of nitrogen per thousand square feet nuts in May is I get later let's say I don't get around to somebody's yard until late June then that numbers gonna drop you know because I don't need the fertilizer to last as long so it may be you know around two pounds of nitrogen per thousand square feet well what does that mean so we've already established it this bag of fertilizer has 38% nitrogen now I'm gonna share with you the way the simple way that it was talked to me on how to understand how much fertilizer to put on your lawn based on the recommended rate for your grass type now you can use this for other grass types other than Bermuda but this fertilizer you know being a 38 percent nitrogen 50-pound bag all you have to do is cut that first number in half so 38 percent nitrogen 50-pound bag means it has 19 pounds of nitrogen in this bag now let's say I've got a 10,000 square foot lawn and understand how big your lawn is you're gonna need to measure a lot but let's say I've got 10,000 square foot lawn and I use one bag of fertilizer for my lawn so how much fertilizer did I just put out if I'm using a 3806 well if one bag covered 10,000 square feet and there's 19 pounds in that bag then that means I'm putting out 1.9 pounds per thousand square feet okay so if I was wanting to put out 2.2 pounds per thousand square feet which is what I'm doing then that bag is only gonna cover more like you know 8,500 square feet something like that without doing the math you know it doesn't take that much research to figure out how much nitrogen to put on your particular grass type so if you had a different grass type let's say I was using centipede grass and I was just wanting to put out a pound of nitrogen per thousand square feet well I could either use this same fertilizer here that's a thirty six percent nitrogen and use half as much or I could use the different blends I use for my centipede lawns I've got an 18 one nine blend and so it's half as much nitrogen in that bag so I can still put out the same amount of fertilizer as I would on my Bermuda yard the same rate because the bag actually only has half as much nitrogen so a lot of times people think you know I think some homeowners don't understand what they're doing necessarily if you just go out and buy you know buy your triple 13 start throwing on your yard it's 13 percent nitrogen so you see what I'm using 38% nice is almost three times as much nitrogen so if you want to equal the amount of nitrogen using a triple 13 on your Bermuda yard you're gonna have to use three times as much to get what is in the bag of fertilizer that I'm using alright let's take a look at the fertilizer here okay so you can see there's a lot more green pellets and white pellets the green pellets are actually a polymer coated this is a polygon technology that that harrell's uses in their fertilizer so it's a polymer coated fertilizer and this particular blend that up guys you can see has a lot of the polymer coated fertilizer which is the green pellets the white ones are more of a quick release fertilizer so you got the slow release green and the quick release white well this particular blend is supposed to last roughly 16 week so you know almost four months from the time I put it out to feed the lawn at a rate at which the grass can actually take it in you know that's sometimes the problem with a quick release fertilizer is it may be putting out a lot of nitrogen but the grass can't always use the nitrogen at the rate that it is available so where this is supposed to be more feeding the grass at a rate that it can take in the nitrogen so that's what's great about this fertilizer I can put it out in May and literally it keeps the grass green throughout the growing season now again talking specifically about in Bermuda on let's say you wanted to be really green well you can put you know more than 2.2 pounds of nitrogen per thousand square feet let's say you want to put 2.5 and you want to crank it up and and have it really growing or let's say that you're not using a 16 week slow release fertilizer let's say that you have an 8 week fertilizer what you can do is you can say well I want to put out 2.2 pounds of nitrogen for the year so if you've got an eight week fertilizer you can put out 1.1 pounds of nitrogen in May come back in July put out another 1.1 pounds of nitrogen again you use that same math okay so whatever blends you have like I said this being a 3806 cut that first number in half night team okay on the 3806 that's how many pounds of nitrogen is in the back then figure out how big your yard is what kind of rate you can use a spreader calculator if you just want to Google fertilizer spreader calculator a lot of times it'll show you some recommended settings you know let it'll say like okay if you've got a let's go spreader or Scot spreader or Spiker spread or whatever you know for this rate or this type for us put it on this setting but again what you want to do is understand how big your yard is and you know your understanding hey if I'm trying to put out 2.2 on this yard on an 8,000 square foot yard if I use the whole bag and it was only halfway done with the yard then I'm putting out way more than 2.2 pounds per thousand so you want to adjust your setting on your spreader same time if you had a in 8,000 square foot yard and you you know you spread it and you only use the half a bag on the whole yard then you didn't put near nearly to 2.2 pounds per thousand square feet so you know just understand what you're trying to accomplish understand how long is this fertilizer gonna keep it green another thing again it's air in the south I mean the weather needs to be warm but one of the great things this was explained to me by a golf course superintendent he said what they do if you have because there's fertilizer blends that have more slow-release in it than what I have you know there's other polymer coated fertilizers out there he said alright now managing a golf course he said what we can do it the Gulf course on a Bermuda fairways we can actually put our our polymer coated fertilizer out whether it's Pollione or some other kind in like February when it's still cold the grass is still dormant now Wow because that polymer coating is not going to start breaking down as much until the weather gets hot so it basically just sits there until the weather starts warming up and then it starts breaking down feeding the grass that turns green now why would you do that why would you do it in February instead of you know just waiting until May well as a golf course superintendent he just said you know we got a lot more time on our hands in February than we do in May mayor grass needs cutting other things so if we can get that out of the way in February that's one less thing we have to do in May so that made a lot of sense to me understanding the polymer coating feeding the grass at a rate at which it can actually use the nitrogen you know it's that whole drinking out of a firehose illustration you know if you put the quick release fertilizer on there sure you're gonna get initial green up but is it going to feed your lawn you know for the next weeks or months even so anyway I hope that's been helpful to you I'd like to hear from you in the comments again I understand what blends you're using what rate you're trying to apply it out and then do a little bit of math to understand how much to put on your particular yard you use a push spreader you can use a chest-mounted spreader you know there's different things out there you can use a ride on spreader you know like I got all I'm work trying to make it even blend you don't want to I tell a joke sometimes about in the south we strive for lawns unfortunately the striping we do is not like the striping that people do with cool-season turf sometimes the striping we do is because somebody did an uneven application of their fertilizer and they left dark strips and light strip dark strip light strip and that is not the kind of striping we're going for so hope this is helpful getting done so subscribe the channel love to hear from you guys and check out these suggested videos thanks a lot