The calendar
A fourth light feed in late spring does no harm on a hard-working lawn. Four is about the ceiling.
- Early spring — the important one. Growth is resuming and the lawn is coming out of a lean few months. This feed sets up the whole season.
- Mid summer — around January, to carry it through the heat when it is growing hardest and being cut most.
- Early autumn — around late March or April. This one thickens the lawn up and hardens it off before the cold, which is what keeps it looking respectable through winter.
Why not in winter
Buffalo, couch and kikuyu all but stop growing in the cold. Fertiliser put down when the grass cannot use it either washes through into the waterways or gets taken up by the winter weeds, which are growing perfectly happily.
You end up paying to fertilise your bindii.
What to use
For a home lawn, a complete slow-release granular fertiliser made for lawns is the sensible default. It carries nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium plus trace elements, and releases over weeks rather than all at once, which means less risk of burning.
Liquid fertilisers work faster and are handy for a quick green-up before visitors, but they do not last. They are a top-up, not the main feed.
The step most people skip
Water it in, straight away, properly. Granular fertiliser sitting dry on the leaf on a hot day is what burns lawns and leaves those dark green and yellow stripes where the spreader ran.
The order is: mow first, spread evenly at the label rate, then water it in immediately. If rain is coming, even better.
Do not over-do it
More nitrogen is not more lawn. Over-feeding pushes soft, sappy leaf growth that is more attractive to grubs and more prone to fungal disease, builds thatch, and means mowing more often than you need to.
If the lawn is fed properly and still not responding, the problem is usually underneath — compaction, poor drainage, or soil pH that has drifted. Feeding harder will not fix any of those.
New turf
Leave new turf alone for its first six weeks or so. It comes off the farm already fed, and it needs to put roots down before it is pushed into leaf growth. After that, join the normal calendar.