Garden Times: Feed Your Lawn

Fall is the most important time of the year to fertilize your lawn. A quality lawn food boosts the natural stores of sugars at the root zone of grass plants to produce a fast, healthy green-up come spring.​

The new CIL IRON+ Fall Lawn Food was years in the making. It Features our DDP® iron for a fast green-up, and a slow-release nitrogen for a longer, sustained green. It is the only lawn fertilizer that I use on my three acres of lawn.

​I recommend that you apply this fertilizer late in the gardening season. For prairie and northern gardeners, apply in October. Central Canada, the Maritimes and British Columbia should apply in late October/early November.

A late application will assure stronger grass roots going into winter and a reserve of sugars come spring. The results? A greener lawn with less snow mould and winter kill.

​There is no needs to sanitize your garden by removing all of the fallen leaves. Instead, rake the leaves from your lawn onto your garden. The grass blades will have access to sunshine and earthworms will have a great meal in the garden.

I call earthworms the foot soldiers of the garden as they do so much work. As the leaves accumulate moisture over the winter months while in contact with garden soil, they begin to break down and become part of the soil.

Come spring when the ground thaws, earthworms move up to the surface of the soil and pull the raw, carbon-rich leaves into the soil and convert them into nitrogen-rich earthworm castings.

​The castings quickly stabilize and become resistant to chemical and physical degradation. They enhance the quality of your soil by stabilizing and storing nitrogen and carbon until the microbes in the soil break them down.

As the worms move through your soil, they open it up, essentially aerating it, making oxygen available to the roots of your plants. Every plant on earth benefits from oxygen to its root zone.

With healthier roots, your plants perform better, the need to fertilize is minimized, and water moves through the soil more efficiently. Plants more easily channel their roots through tunnels created by the earthworms.