Worth knowing what you are aiming at, because it is more than colour.
Deep green rather than bright green. Bright yellow green is usually a nitrogen surge on its own. Deep green comes from magnesium and iron alongside the nitrogen, and it lasts.
Dense underfoot. A well fed lawn thickens from the base rather than simply growing taller, and density is what actually keeps moss and weeds out, because there is no bare soil for them to land on.
Upright rather than lying down. Grass with enough potassium and trace elements stands up, which makes for a cleaner cut and a lawn that looks even after mowing rather than streaked.
Resilient. It takes a summer of football, a dog and a paddling pool and grows back rather than thinning out, and it holds its colour further into a dry August before it goes dormant.
And quieter over time. A lawn on decent soil that has been fed consistently for a few years needs less intervention, not more, because the soil is doing a larger share of the work. That is the destination. Everything below is how to get there, starting with the plan itself.
Organifer Tip: A genuinely healthy lawn is not only green. Density, upright growth, recovery after wear and resilience through dry periods are just as important.
What is the plan for a perfect lawn, season by season?
The whole year on one page. Each step makes the next one work, which is why the order matters as much as the steps.
Early spring
Test the pH. It takes ten minutes and decides whether everything after it works. If it comes back below 5.5, correct it first with Lime Fertiliser with Magnesium. The lime lifts the pH, the magnesium goes straight into colour, and leave a few weeks before feeding.
Spring, once the grass is growing
The first feed. 1 kg per 10 to 20 m2, the heavier rate where the lawn is short or the soil is poor. Lawn Fertiliser All-In-One carries nitrogen for growth, potassium for hardiness, magnesium for colour and lime to hold the pH where you just put it. Spread evenly, water it in, stay off it for five days.
Late spring
Close the bare patches while the soil is warm and moist. Rake, sow Lawn Repair Seed, press it in and keep it damp. Bare ground left open is where moss and weeds get their start.
Summer
The second feed at 1 kg per 20 m2, or 1 kg per 10 m2 if the lawn is still short, ahead of rain. Raise the mowing height and leave the clippings on.
Late August to October
Aerate, scarify if the thatch is thick, overseed with Lawn Repair Seed, then the autumn feed at 1 kg per 20 m2. Never more in autumn.
Winter
Nothing. Keep leaves off the grass and stay off frozen turf. That is the plan. The rest of this guide explains each step properly, so you know why it works and what to do when the lawn does not behave the way the plan says it should.
Organifer Tip: The autumn feed should stay at 1 kg per 20 m2. Autumn feeding is about hardiness, not forcing extra growth before winter.
How do you make a lawn thicker?
Two ways at once: make each grass plant produce more shoots, and fill the gaps with new plants. Grass thickens by tillering, sending up new shoots from the base of each plant. That needs nitrogen for the growth, potassium and trace elements for the strength to carry it, and regular mowing, because cutting is what signals the plant to branch rather than grow taller. A lawn that is fed three times a year and mown weekly at a sensible height thickens by itself season on season. The gaps need seed. Tillering will not close a patch the size of a hand. Overseeding in spring or early autumn with Lawn Repair Seed fills them, and the next feed then thickens the new plants along with the old. Feeding and seeding together is what turns a thin lawn into a dense one within a season. And take the pressure off the roots. Compacted soil and a pH below 5.5 both hold grass back however well it is fed, which is why aerating and liming belong in the same plan.
Organifer Tip: If you can clearly see bare soil, feeding alone will not close the gap. Overseed it and then feed the new grass along with the established lawn.
How do you make a lawn greener?
Feed it, and make sure the feed contains magnesium, because nitrogen alone gives you growth but not necessarily colour. Nitrogen makes grass grow and green up. Magnesium is the atom at the centre of every chlorophyll molecule, so it decides how deep that green goes. A lawn fed on nitrogen alone tends towards a bright yellow green that fades within weeks. A lawn with magnesium alongside goes deep green and stays there. Lawn Fertiliser All-In-One carries 3 per cent magnesium alongside the nitrogen for exactly that reason. And if the soil is acidic as well, Lime Fertiliser with Magnesium corrects the pH and adds more magnesium in the same pass, which is often the quickest single route from a tired lawn to a green one. Then water it in and give it a fortnight. Colour arrives in one to two weeks in growing conditions and keeps deepening through the following month.
Organifer Tip: Plenty of growth without much improvement in colour can point to magnesium rather than a lack of nitrogen.
What does lawn fertiliser actually do?
It supplies the three nutrients grass uses in quantity and cannot get enough of from most garden soils, plus the trace elements it needs in small amounts. A lawn is an unusually demanding thing to grow. You cut it every week through the growing season, and on most lawns the clippings go in a box and leave the garden. Nothing else in a garden is harvested fifty times a year. That is why lawns run down when nothing is put back, and why a lawn that has never been fed is usually pale, thin and full of the things that tolerate poverty better than grass does. A good fertiliser does a second job as well, which is feeding the soil rather than only the plant. That part is slower and it is the part that compounds.
What do the numbers on a bag of lawn feed mean?
Three numbers, always in the same order: nitrogen, phosphate, potassium. They are percentages by weight. Organifer Lawn Fertiliser All-In-One is NPK (Mg) 9-2-7 (+3), so nine per cent nitrogen, two per cent phosphate, seven per cent potassium, and a fourth figure in brackets for magnesium. One detail that confuses people. Phosphate, potassium and magnesium are declared as oxides, written P2O5, K2O and MgO, because that is the European convention for fertiliser labels. So the 2 is two per cent P2O5, the 7 is seven per cent K2O and the 3 is three per cent MgO. It does not change how you use the product, but it is why the figures on a label never quite match what you read about pure elements.
Nitrogen
Nitrogen builds leaf. It is what makes grass grow and what makes it green, and it is the number people fixate on. Too much and you get soft, sappy growth that flops in drought, tears under wear and picks up disease.
Phosphate
Phosphate builds roots and is involved in energy transfer inside the plant. Established lawns need very little, because phosphate stays put in soil rather than washing away, and most garden soils already have plenty. A low middle number is a sign of a well designed lawn feed, not a cheap one. Piling on phosphate a lawn does not need also suppresses the mycorrhizal partnerships that help grass reach water.
Potassium
Potassium builds nothing you can see. It regulates water movement inside the plant, controls the stomata that open and close on the leaf, and thickens cell walls. A lawn with enough potassium stands up to drought, frost, football and disease. A lawn without it looks good in May and falls apart in August.
Magnesium
The fourth figure in brackets is where many lawn feeds stop and this one does not. On this product it is (+3), three per cent magnesium. It is in brackets because magnesium is a secondary nutrient, listed after the main three, and it is the one most responsible for colour.
Organifer Tip: Don’t judge a lawn fertiliser only by its nitrogen number. Potassium, magnesium and the overall nutrient balance matter just as much.
What does magnesium do for grass?
It is the reason grass is green, literally. Magnesium sits at the physical centre of the chlorophyll molecule. Every chlorophyll molecule a plant builds has one magnesium atom at its core, so a plant short of magnesium cannot build the pigment it photosynthesises with, no matter how much nitrogen it has available. The practical version: if you have ever fed a lawn, got plenty of growth and no real colour, magnesium is the first thing to suspect. Sandy soils lose it readily because it washes through, clippings carried off the lawn remove it every week, and shortage shows as yellowing between the veins of older leaves while the veins themselves stay green.
Why does a lawn feed need magnesium as well as potassium?
Because the two compete. Potassium and magnesium are taken up at the root through the same routes, and when potassium is plentiful it tends to crowd magnesium out. A high potassium feed on its own can produce exactly the lawn nobody wants, tough and hard wearing but pale. That is why the 7 and the (+3) belong together. The potassium builds hardiness, the magnesium keeps the colour, and supplying both in the same granule keeps them in balance rather than trading one off against the other. It is also why the potassium rich autumn feed still carries magnesium of its own. Magnesium does more than colour, too. It activates the enzymes the plant uses to move sugars around, which matters for root growth and for recovery after wear, and it is involved in how the plant uses phosphate. A lawn short of it underperforms in ways that look like several other problems at once.
How much lawn fertiliser do you need per square metre?
For maintenance feeding, 1 kilo per 20 square metres per application. So a 20 kilo bag covers 400 square metres. For a new lawn, 1 kilo per 10 square metres, worked into the soil before sowing. Double the rate, because you are building a seedbed rather than topping up an established sward. On an established lawn the rate changes with the season, and it is simplest as a schedule.
Spring
1 kilo per 10 to 20 square metres. The heavier rate where the lawn is short, pale or thin, or on poor or sandy soil.
Summer
1 kilo per 20 square metres, or 1 kilo per 10 where the lawn is still short.
Autumn
1 kilo per 20 square metres, whatever the soil. Never more. The rule underneath is simple. Wherever a lawn shows a shortage, 1 kilo per 10 square metres. Spring is where that pays most, because the grass is growing hard enough to use it. Autumn stays at the standard rate because that application is about toughening the grass for winter rather than pushing growth into the frost. So a hungry lawn gets the heavier rate in spring and summer. Never in autumn. The published rates assume an average lawn on average soil. Grass type, soil type, climate and how run down the lawn already is all shift it, which is why the recommendation on the bag is a starting point rather than a prescription. If in doubt, apply the standard rate and judge the result rather than guessing upwards. Sizes run from 5 kg for 100 m2 up to 20 kg for 400 m2 and bulk pallets beyond that. Work out your area first and buy for three applications rather than one, because the second and third are where the result actually comes from.
Organifer Tip: If you are unsure which rate to use, start with the standard rate rather than guessing upwards.
How do you spread lawn fertiliser evenly?
Even spreading matters more than the exact quantity, and there is a method to it that professionals use and most gardeners have never been told. A patchy spread gives a striped lawn for three months and nothing fixes it until the next feed grows it out.
Start with the edges
Walk one full pass around the perimeter of the lawn before anything else, so you have a border strip already fed. Then work up and down inside that strip. You never have to spread off the edge onto paving, borders or a pond, and you turn on ground you have already covered rather than on untreated grass. Edges are where most people go wrong, because the edge is where you turn.
Shut the spreader off while you turn
A hopper that keeps dropping through a pivot lays a double dose in an arc, and those arcs are the over green or scorched curves you see on other people’s lawns. Close, turn, line up, open.
Halve the rate and double the passes
Set the spreader to half your intended rate and go over the whole lawn twice, the second pass at right angles to the first. Anything the machine does slightly unevenly is cancelled out by the crossing pass, and you are far less likely to run out three quarters of the way across.
Overlap the bands slightly
A rotary spreader throws heaviest through the centre of its pattern and tails off at the edges, so a small overlap gives an even rate rather than wasting product. Pick a marker on the far side to keep your lines straight.
By hand, never in one pass
You cannot spread evenly enough by hand in a single go and it will show all season. Split the quantity into two halves, walk the first up and down the lawn, then walk the second across it at right angles. Same principle, same result.
Rotary or drop spreader?
Both give a very even result when used properly. A rotary spreader covers ground quickly and is highly accurate with the right overlap, which is why it is what most professionals use on larger lawns and sports turf. A drop spreader lays a band you can see exactly, with no throw pattern to judge, which makes it easy to use on small or awkwardly shaped lawns and right up to borders. Either beats hand spreading over about a hundred square metres. One last thing worth knowing. A fine microgranulate disappears into short turf rather than sitting visibly on top, which is good for appearance and awkward for tracking, so work in strips you can keep account of. And because Organifer Lawn Fertiliser All-In-One contains no iron sulphate, granules that land on paving will not stain it the way a combined moss and feed product does. Sweep them back onto the grass in any case.
Organifer Tip: For the most even result, split the total dose in half and apply it in two passes at right angles to each other.
When should you feed your lawn?
Between March and October, three times, spaced across the season. With Lawn Fertiliser All-In-One each feed carries up to a hundred days of nutrition, so three spaced feeds cover the whole growing season with overlap between them. The first feed goes on when the grass is actively growing rather than on a calendar date. Soil temperature is what matters, and the usual threshold is soil that has warmed to around eight to ten degrees and stayed there. In most of northern Europe that means late March into April. Soil lags air temperature by a couple of weeks, so a warm week in February is not the signal. The lawn needing its first proper mow is. The second goes on when the first is running down, which is early to mid summer on most lawns. The third is the autumn feed, and it is a different job. See below. What to avoid is feeding into a drought or a heatwave. A lawn under water stress cannot take up what you give it, and pushing growth on a plant that cannot support it wastes the fertiliser and stresses the grass.
How many times a year should you feed a lawn?
Three is the standard programme and it suits most gardens. Two is enough on a lawn that is mown high, has its clippings left on and is not under heavy use. Four or more is the territory of sports turf and show lawns, and on an ordinary garden lawn it usually produces growth you then have to mow rather than quality you can see. The thing that changes the answer most is whether you collect the clippings. A lawn whose clippings go back returns a substantial share of its own nitrogen and genuinely needs less feeding.
What is the difference between spring and autumn lawn feed?
The ratio, and it is the single most useful thing to understand about lawn feeding. In spring and summer you are feeding for growth, so you want nitrogen. In autumn you are feeding for hardiness, and nitrogen is the last thing you want. Nitrogen late in the season produces soft new growth going into the first frosts. Soft tissue damages easily in cold, holds water and is where disease gets in. Potassium does the opposite. It thickens cell walls and improves the plant’s tolerance of cold, wet and wear, and a lawn that goes into winter with plenty of it comes through better and greens up earlier in spring. You can see it in the numbers. A good general lawn feed already leans towards potassium.
Organifer Lawn Fertiliser All-In-One is 9-2-7, so there is a great deal more potassium in it than phosphate, and it is made to be used for all three feeds including the autumn one. Feeding your whole year with a single product like that is a perfectly sound way to run a lawn, and it is what the label tells you to do. What you change between the seasons is the amount rather than the bag. Heavier in spring if the soil is poor, standard rate in autumn without exception. And if you want to push the hardiness further still, a dedicated autumn feed takes the same principle further.
Autumn Fertiliser All-In-One is NPK 6-2-12. Less nitrogen again, nearly double the potassium, at the same 1 kilo per 20 square metres and the same hundred day duration, with September and October as the window. It is worth the swap on a lawn that takes heavy use through winter, sits wet, or comes out of every spring looking damaged.
On an ordinary garden lawn that is dry underfoot and lightly used, the general feed will see you through autumn without trouble. What matters far more than which of the two you pick is that the autumn feed happens at all. It is the application people skip, and it is the one that decides what the lawn looks like the following April.
Organifer Tip: The most important autumn change is not necessarily the product — it is making sure the autumn application actually happens.
Can you fertilise a wet lawn, or does it have to be dry?
Either works with a microgranulate, which is unusual and makes planning much easier than with most products. What matters is what happens afterwards, and this is the step that decides whether the feed works at all. Granules need moisture to break down and to move off the leaf into the soil where the roots are. Without it they sit on the surface and nothing happens.
So the ideal is to spread with rain in the forecast.
If the weather is dry, water it in yourself the same day. Give it a proper soaking rather than a sprinkle, enough to wet the top few centimetres, and stop before water starts running off across the surface, because run off takes granules with it. There is a second reason it matters on this product in particular. A large part of the nitrogen is organic and has to be released by soil organisms before the grass can use any of it, and those organisms need moisture to work.
A watered in feed starts releasing immediately. A dry one waits for the weather.The one thing to avoid is spreading onto a lawn wet with dew and then leaving it dry for a fortnight, because granules sitting on damp leaf blades in sunshine can mark the leaf.
Watering in solves that as well.
When can you mow after fertilising?
Wait five days.
This is the most commonly ignored instruction in lawn care and it costs people a meaningful share of every bag. The granules need those days to break down and work into the soil. Mow after two days and a good proportion of what you spread goes into the collection box, because it is still sitting at the base of the sward rather than in the ground. Keep the traffic off as far as you reasonably can for the same period. Feet, wheelbarrows and dogs move granules around and undo the even spread you just worked for.
Organifer Tip: Mow first, fertilise second, then leave the lawn alone for five days.
Can lawn fertiliser burn your grass?
A soluble, high nitrogen fertiliser can, and it happens in two ways. Either the dose is too high, or it lands unevenly, and both concentrate salts around the roots faster than the plant can cope with. An organic mineral microgranulate is much harder to burn with, because a substantial part of the nitrogen has to be released by soil organisms before the plant can take it up. There is no sudden salt load. Two rules still apply. Do not double up because you are unsure, and do not tip the spreader out while it is standing still on the lawn. A pile of any fertiliser in one spot will kill the grass under it.
Does lawn feed get rid of moss and weeds?
Not directly. It does not kill either one, and it is worth understanding what is actually happening rather than expecting it to. Moss is not an invader. It is an occupier. It moves into ground that grass has given up on, and grass gives up for specific and identifiable reasons: shade, compaction, acidity, being cut too short, or simply being underfed for years.
Weeds behave the same way. Almost all lawn weeds need bare soil or a thin sward to establish in. So a well fed, dense lawn hinders both, because there is no bare ground for a spore or a seed to land on and no light reaching the soil surface. That is competitive exclusion and it is a real and durable mechanism. It is also slow, and it does nothing about moss that is already established and holding ground.
Which means the sequence matters.
Killing the moss without fixing why the grass retreated gets you the same moss next year, with money spent twice. If moss is already well established, Iron Sulphate Fertiliser has a direct action on it and is the right tool for that job. Rake the dead moss out afterwards and overseed the bare ground it leaves, otherwise moss simply recolonises the gaps. Worth knowing that Lawn Fertiliser All-In-One itself is free from iron sulphate, which is why it does not stain paving, patios or boots. And if the moss is in a compacted, shaded or thatchy lawn, the feed alone will not hold it back.
Lawn Topdressing Mix after aerating deals with the soil side, and Shadow Lawn Grass Seed is bred for the light levels under trees and along north facing walls where ordinary lawn seed never really succeeds.
Organifer Tip: Treat the reason the moss appeared, not only the moss itself. Otherwise it is likely to return.
Featured products in this guide
Autumn Fertiliser All-In-One (5 kg - for 100 m2)
Choose your option
Drought-Resistant Lawn Seed - Arida (1 kg for 50 m2)
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Lawn Fertiliser All-In-One (5 kg - for 100 m2)
Choose your option
Lawn Repair Seed - Resilient (1 kg for 50 m2)
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Iron Sulphate Fertiliser - Moss Remover - 5 kg for 200 m2
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Lawn Topdressing - Mix with Mycorrhiza and Rhizobacteria (50 Litres - for 50 m2)
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Shadow Lawn Grass Seed - Elegant (1 kg for 50 m2)
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Nematodes - Soil Nematode Concentrate - 250ml for 250 m2
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Grass Insects Concentrate - 250 ml for 62 m2
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Sports and Play Lawn Seed - Resilient (1 kg for 50 m2)
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Microclover Lawn - Pure clover seed (100 g for 50 m2)
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Scarifying Mix - Grass Seed - Fertiliser - Soil Conditioner (5 kg - for 150 m2)
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Pro Turf & Lawn Fertilizer - Controlled Release (5 kg for 165 m2)
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Should you use a weed and feed?
A weed and feed is a lawn fertiliser with a selective herbicide mixed in, so it feeds the grass and kills broadleaf weeds in the same pass. Organifer Lawn Fertiliser All-In-One is not one. There is no herbicide in it. That is a deliberate choice rather than a gap. A herbicide deals with the weeds that are there today and does nothing about why they arrived, which is almost always a thin sward with bare soil between the plants. Feed the grass properly and keep it dense and most lawn weeds never get a foothold. For the ones already there, a handful of dandelions or plantains is a ten minute job with a weeding knife, and a daisy in a lawn is a matter of taste rather than a problem. One practical warning if you do use a weed and feed product:
Do not overseed straight afterwards.
Herbicide residue in the surface stops new grass seedlings establishing, and the usual advice is to wait around six weeks. If you are planning to overseed in autumn, feed without a herbicide.
Do you still need to lime the lawn separately?
For routine maintenance, no. For correcting a soil that has drifted, yes. Most lawns acidify slowly over years, through rainfall, through nitrogen fertiliser and through the nutrients removed in clippings.
Lime is traditionally applied in spring or autumn to hold the acidity in range, and Organifer Lawn Fertiliser All-In-One has lime and rock meal in the blend so that routine job happens as part of the feed rather than as a separate operation. That covers maintenance. It does not correct a lawn that is already well below range, because a maintenance amount of lime inside a fertiliser applied at 1 kilo per 20 square metres is not a correction dose.
So test rather than assume.
Most lawns sit best between pH 5.5 and 6.5, a test kit costs a few euros, and if yours comes back below that it is worth fixing properly before spending on anything else. Below about 5.5 a great deal stops working well, including the soil organisms that break down thatch. For an actual correction, Lime Fertiliser with Magnesium does it quickly, and the magnesium in it does a second job, because magnesium is what puts the deep green into grass.
Sizes run 5 kg, 10 kg, 20 kg for gardens, and 200 kg, 400 kg, 600 kg, 800 kg and 1200 kg for sports fields, paddocks and larger areas.
One rule whichever you use: leave a few weeks between liming and any nitrogen or organic feed, or you lose nitrogen to the air as ammonia and gain nothing.
Why is my lawn still pale after feeding it?
Work through these before reaching for more nitrogen, because more nitrogen is often the wrong answer. Pale with thin, slow growth is usually genuine hunger, and feeding is the answer. Pale with plenty of growth is not hunger. The plant has nitrogen and cannot make chlorophyll with it. That points to magnesium, or to iron that is present in the soil but locked up because the pH is too high. More nitrogen touches neither. Yellowing between the veins of older leaves points to magnesium. The same pattern on the youngest leaves points to iron. Then there are the non nutritional causes.
Mowing too short, which starves the plant of the leaf area it photosynthesises with. Drought stress. Compaction. And grubs or leatherjackets eating the roots, which shows as patches rather than an even pallor and often with birds tearing at the turf. If patches lift like loose carpet and there are fat white grubs curled underneath, treat the cause before you feed or reseed. Nematodes or Grass Insects Concentrate deal with that, and feeding a lawn whose roots are being eaten is money spent twice.
Organifer Tip: If the lawn has grown after feeding but stayed pale, diagnose the colour problem before adding more nitrogen.
Do grass clippings count as feeding the lawn?
Yes, and it is the cheapest lawn feed there is.
Clippings are roughly three quarters water and the dry remainder is high in nitrogen. Left on the lawn they break down within days and return a substantial share of the nitrogen you applied, which measurably reduces how much feed a lawn needs over a year. They do not cause thatch. That belief is persistent and research contradicted it decades ago.
Thatch is built from stems, crowns and roots, which are high in lignin and slow to decompose. Clippings are soft leaf and they are gone in a week. The exception is when the grass has got away from you and the clippings come off in wet clumps. Those smother. Collect those, or go over the lawn a second time to chop them finer.
What is actually in Organifer Lawn Fertiliser All-In-One?
Four components, and only one of them behaves like a conventional fertiliser. Knowing which is which explains why it acts the way it does.
The mineral fraction
The mineral fraction is plant available almost immediately. It is what produces colour in the first fortnight and it is the part that behaves like a normal feed.
The organic fraction
The organic fraction cannot be taken up by the plant at all until soil organisms have broken it down. That is the slow half, it tracks soil temperature rather than the calendar, and it is the reason one application covers up to a hundred days. It also means the fertiliser is feeding the soil population and not only the grass, and as those organisms work through it they build humus. Humus improves root penetration and holds nutrients in the root zone instead of letting them leach past it.
Natural phosphate
The phosphate is natural phosphate, and there is not much of it, because an established lawn needs very little. That is why the middle number is two.
Lime, rock meal and turf strengthener
Lime and rock meal hold the acidity in range, so the nutrients already in your soil stay available rather than locking up. And the turf strengthener, a blend of minerals and trace elements assembled specifically for grass. This is the component most lawn feeds do not have and the one that matters over years rather than weeks.
Why do trace elements matter on a lawn in particular?
Because a lawn is the most extractive thing in most gardens and nothing conventional puts them back. You cut a lawn perhaps forty times a year, and on most lawns the clippings go into a box and leave the garden. Every one of those boxes takes magnesium, manganese, zinc, boron, copper and the rest with it. A standard NPK feed replaces nitrogen, phosphate and potassium, because those are the three that visibly limit growth, and replaces none of the others. The shortage that results is not dramatic, which is precisely why it goes unnoticed for years. Trace elements are needed in tiny quantities and every one is needed. A soil short of a single one underperforms slightly and constantly, with no symptom you can point at, no matter how much nitrogen you apply. The lawn is simply never quite as good as it should be and nobody can say why. That is what rock meal and a trace element blend are doing in a lawn feed. It is not a bonus ingredient, it is the part that closes a loop the mower opens every week.
What does it mean that a fertiliser improves the soil?
It means the soil is measurably better after the feed than before it, rather than simply having had nutrients pass through it. With a purely soluble fertiliser, nutrients go in, the plant takes what it can and rain moves the rest, and the soil finishes the season in the same state it started. Nothing accumulates. That is why a lawn on that programme needs the same amount again next year, and the year after. An organic mineral feed does three things instead of one. It supplies nutrients to the grass. It supplies organic matter to the soil organisms, which they convert into humus that improves structure, holds water and grips nutrients where roots can reach them. And it returns minerals and trace elements that left in the clippings.
The practical result is compounding. Two or three seasons in, the soil holds more water through a dry spell, releases nutrients more evenly, and supports a denser sward that needs less intervention. Every application leaves the ground slightly more fertile than it found it, which is a genuinely different proposition from feeding the plant and walking away.
Organifer Tip: Feeding the grass gives the visible short-term result. Improving the soil is what makes the lawn easier to manage over several seasons.
What is an organic mineral fertiliser, and why does it matter?
A fertiliser that combines a mineral fraction, available within days, with an organic fraction that soil organisms release over months. That combination is why one application lasts up to a hundred days rather than three weeks, why it is hard to scorch a lawn with, and why far less of it washes through after heavy rain. The organic half is also what feeds the soil rather than only the grass, which is covered in full above.
What is the difference between lawn fertiliser, topdressing and a soil improver?
They solve different problems and are often bought in the wrong order.
Fertiliser feeds the grass. Use it when the lawn is hungry, meaning pale, thin, slow growing, but with reasonable soil underneath.
Topdressing feeds the soil at the surface and adds biology. Use it when the soil is the problem: a thatch layer building up, a lawn that browns early every summer, ground that has never had organic matter returned to it.
A soil improver does the same thing on a larger scale and is worked in rather than dressed on, which makes it a job for bare ground or for borders rather than an established lawn. A lawn can need all three over time and very rarely needs them in the same week. Feed the grass if the grass is hungry. Dress the soil if the soil is tired. Diagnose first. Lawn Topdressing Mix is the one to reach for when the answer is the soil rather than the grass, particularly on sandy ground that dries out or on a lawn where the thatch layer is creeping up.
Should you feed a new lawn?
Yes, and at double the maintenance rate, but before you sow rather than after.
For a new installation, 1 kilo per 10 square metres, worked into the soil while you are preparing the seedbed. That puts nutrition where the new roots are about to go rather than on top of them. After sowing, leave it. A seedling lawn does not need feeding until it has been mown two or three times, and granules scattered over germinating seed do nothing useful. Match the seed to the situation.
Lawn Repair Seed for thin and worn ground, Sports and Play Lawn Seed where it takes real traffic, and Drought-Resistant Lawn Seed on thin sandy soil that browns every July. Worth considering too: Microclover sown into a lawn fixes its own nitrogen out of the air and stays green through a drought that browns grass, which reduces how much feeding the lawn needs at all. It changes the look of a lawn, so it is a choice rather than an upgrade.
Can you feed a lawn in a drought or a heatwave?
Better not.
Wait for the weather to break. Grass under water stress closes its stomata and effectively stops taking nutrients up, so the fertiliser sits there unused. Worse, if it does get taken up you are asking a plant that cannot get enough water to produce new growth it then has to support. If the lawn has gone brown in a drought, that is dormancy rather than death in almost every case. It will come back when the rain does. Feeding it will not speed that up and may damage it. There is no window closing on you either. The bag keeps for up to two years stored cool and dry out of direct sunlight.
Organifer Tip: A brown lawn during drought is usually dormant, not dead. Wait for moisture and active growth before feeding again.
Is it safe around children and pets?
It is a fertiliser rather than a pesticide, and it contains no iron sulphate, which is the ingredient in many combined lawn products that stains paving and clothing. Ordinary sense applies. Keep children and animals off until it has been watered in, which you want to do anyway, and do not let a dog eat granules off the lawn. The five day wait before heavy use covers most of this by itself.
How long does lawn fertiliser take to work?
Colour in one to two weeks in growing conditions, and the full effect over the following month. The quick part is the mineral fraction, which is plant available almost immediately. The slow part is the organic fraction, which soil organisms have to break down first, and that tracks soil temperature rather than the calendar. Feed a cold soil in early March and very little happens until it warms, however good the product is. If two weeks have passed in warm, moist, growing weather and nothing at all has changed, the fertiliser is usually not the problem. Work through the pale lawn list above instead.
Can you over fertilise a lawn?
Yes, and the damage takes two forms.
The immediate one is scorch, from too high a dose or from a pile dropped in one spot. With an organic mineral microgranulate this is hard to do accidentally, because much of the nitrogen is not immediately available, but tipping a spreader out while standing still will still kill the grass underneath it. The slower one is more common and less obvious. Feeding heavily year after year produces soft, fast growth that needs more mowing, wears more easily, gets more disease and builds a thatch layer faster than the soil can decompose it. A lawn that has been fed hard for a decade often looks worse than one fed sensibly, and the answer is not another bag. If you are unsure, apply the stated rate and judge the result. Guessing upwards is how people arrive at the second problem.
Should you fertilise before or after mowing?
After, and then leave it alone for five days.
Mow first so the sward is short and the granules can reach the base of the plants and the soil rather than sitting on long leaf. Then spread. Then stay off it. Doing it the other way round, spreading and then mowing two days later, lifts a substantial share of what you spread straight into the collection box.
Should you fertilise before or after scarifying?
After, and it matters.
Scarifying is deliberately damaging. It tears out thatch and opens the sward, and the lawn has to regrow into the gaps you have made. Feeding immediately afterwards is what powers that recovery, and this is one of the few moments when a lawn genuinely benefits from being pushed. Feeding a week before scarifying largely wastes it, because you then rip out a good deal of the growth you just paid for. The classic autumn sequence is scarify, aerate, overseed, feed, then topdress. Scarifying Mix combines the seed, the feed and a soil conditioner for exactly that moment, which saves doing three passes.
Can you fertilise and overseed at the same time?
Yes, and autumn is the moment to do both. New seed needs phosphate for root development and a soil that is not short of anything else, so an established lawn being overseeded benefits from a feed at the same time. What you should not do is apply a high nitrogen feed and then expect seedlings to compete with the growth spurt you just triggered in the mature grass around them. The practical order is scarify or rake to open the surface, aerate if the ground is compacted, sow, feed at the normal maintenance rate, topdress thinly over the seed, then water it in and keep it damp until it is up.
Organifer Tip: For autumn renovation, think in this order: scarify, aerate, overseed, feed, topdress and water.
What is the difference between slow release and quick release lawn feed?
How fast the nitrogen becomes available to the plant, and it changes everything about how you use the product. Quick release nitrogen is soluble and available within days. You get a fast green up and then a fade, usually within four to six weeks, and there is a real risk of scorch if the dose is wrong and of leaching into ground water if heavy rain follows. Slow release nitrogen, whether coated or organic, has to be released gradually, either by moisture breaking down a coating or by soil organisms digesting organic matter. You get less drama and a much longer duration. An organic mineral blend has both, which is why one application covers up to a hundred days rather than a month. The practical consequence is the number of applications. A quick release feed needs applying every four to six weeks through the season. Three applications a year only works with a long duration product.
Granular or liquid lawn feed?
Granular for the season, liquid for a specific short term correction. Granular is what you use for the three main feeds. It is cheap per square metre, it lasts, and a microgranulate spreads accurately. Liquid feeds are taken up partly through the leaf, so they act within days. That makes them useful for correcting a specific visible deficiency quickly, or for greening a lawn before an event, and useless as a season programme because the effect is gone within weeks. If you are choosing one, choose granular. If you already feed granular and want a fast fix for a particular problem, a liquid alongside it is reasonable.
Is organic lawn feed better than synthetic?
For a lawn you intend to keep for years, an organic or organic mineral feed has a real advantage, and it is worth being specific about what the advantage actually is rather than treating organic as a virtue by itself. A purely synthetic feed supplies nutrients to the plant and does nothing else. It works, it is usually cheaper per unit of nitrogen, and the effect ends when the nutrients are used or leached. An organic or organic mineral feed supplies nutrients and also feeds the soil population that processes them, so the soil ends each season slightly better than it started and that accumulates. The mechanism is explained above under what it means for a fertiliser to improve the soil. It is also much harder to scorch a lawn with and much less likely to leach into ground water after heavy rain, because most of the nitrogen has to be released biologically before it can go anywhere.
Why does part of my lawn grow faster than the rest?
Three usual causes, and they are easy to tell apart.
Stripes or blocks
Stripes or blocks of dark and pale growth, with straight edges, are an uneven spread. That is a spreader problem, not a soil problem, and the fix is the two pass method at right angles.
Dark green rings or patches
Dark green rings or patches with a ring of very lush growth around a dead centre are dog urine. Nitrogen in concentration scorches the middle and feeds the edge. Water the spot heavily as soon as you can.
Irregular poor patches
Irregular patches that are consistently poor year after year usually reflect what is underneath. Buried rubble from a build, a filled in path, a tree root plate, or a compacted route people walk. Feeding harder does not change any of those, and a spade will tell you more than another bag will.
A month by month lawn feeding calendar
A reference rather than a schedule. Watch the lawn and the soil temperature rather than the date.
January and February
Nothing. The grass is not growing and there is nothing to feed. Keep off it when it is frozen.
March
The first feed goes on once the grass is genuinely growing and needs mowing again, not on the first warm week. In a cold spring this waits until April. Where the lawn is short or the soil is poor, this is the feed to go heavier on, at 1 kilo per 10 square metres.
April and May
The main growth period. The spring feed is carrying the lawn. Mow regularly and never take more than a third of the leaf.
June
The spring feed is running down. The summer feed goes on, ideally ahead of rain.
July and August
Raise the mowing height. Do not feed into a drought. A brown lawn in August is dormant rather than dead and will come back with the rain.
September
The best month of the year for lawn work. Warm soil, returning rain, and months before winter. Scarify, aerate, overseed and topdress now if you are going to.
September to October
The autumn feed. Standard rate, 1 kilo per 20 square metres, and resist the urge to go heavier. This one is for hardiness rather than growth, and it is the feed that decides what the lawn looks like next April.
November and December
Nothing. Keep leaves off the lawn so the grass underneath is not smothered, and stay off frozen turf.
Organifer Tip: Use the calendar as a guide, not a rigid schedule. Grass growth and soil temperature are better signals than the date alone.
Should you feed a lawn that has clover or wildflowers in it?
Less, and think about what you are feeding for. Clover fixes its own nitrogen out of the air through bacteria in its root nodules, and it shares a useful amount of it with the grass around it. A lawn with clover in it genuinely needs less nitrogen, and feeding it hard works against the clover, because clover competes poorly against grass that has been pushed. If you have deliberately sown clover or a flowering lawn, feed sparingly or not at all, and concentrate on pH and soil rather than on nitrogen. If clover has appeared uninvited and you do not want it, that usually means the lawn is short of nitrogen and the clover is exploiting the gap.
Does feeding help a lawn survive drought?
The autumn and spring feeds do. Feeding during the drought does not. Potassium is the relevant nutrient. It regulates water movement inside the plant and controls the stomata, the pores on the leaf that open to take in carbon dioxide and lose water while they are open. A lawn with enough potassium manages that trade off better and holds out longer. Deep roots matter at least as much, and those come from mowing high and from soil that roots can actually get into, rather than from a bag. What does not help is feeding a lawn that is already stressed and brown. It cannot use it, and you are asking for growth the plant cannot water.
Fertilising sports fields, paddocks and large areas
The rate does not change.
One kilo per 20 square metres means 50 kilos for a thousand square metre pitch, per application, which is bulk bag territory rather than consumer bags. Two things change at scale. First, spread accuracy matters more, because a striped football pitch is very visible and a tractor mounted or pedestrian spreader calibrated properly is worth the setup time. Second, wear recovery becomes the main objective rather than colour, which pushes the balance further towards potassium through the whole season rather than only in autumn. Horse paddocks are a different case again. Grazing removes nutrients continuously and returns them unevenly, and paddock soils drift down in pH over years. Test before assuming the answer is nitrogen.
Does lawn fertiliser go off?
Not quickly.
Stored cool, dry and out of direct sunlight, this one keeps for up to two years without loss of quality. What ruins a bag is damp. Granules that have absorbed moisture clump together, and clumped fertiliser will not spread evenly, which puts you back to the striped lawn problem. Fold the bag closed, keep it off a concrete floor and keep it out of a greenhouse or a hot shed.
Which Organifer lawn product for which problem?
Diagnose first, then buy. Roughly in order of how often the diagnosis turns out to be each one.
Lawn Fertiliser All-In-One
A hungry lawn. Pale, thin, slow, with reasonable soil underneath. All three feeds of the year, spring, summer and autumn, with the rate doing the seasonal work.
Autumn Fertiliser All-In-One
An optional step up for the autumn feed on a lawn that takes heavy winter use or sits wet. Less nitrogen, more potassium, the same rate.
Pro Turf Controlled Release
Where you want one application to hold a lawn steady for months rather than feeding to a schedule.
Lime Fertiliser with Magnesium
A pH test below 5.5. Correct that before spending on anything else, because it limits everything else.
Lawn Topdressing Mix
Tired soil rather than hungry grass. A thatch layer creeping up, or a lawn that browns early every year.
Iron Sulphate Fertiliser
Established moss that has to be cleared before the bare ground underneath can be reseeded.
Scarifying Mix
Thatch over about two and a half centimetres, which has to come out mechanically. Seed, feed and conditioner for the repair afterwards. And if your lawn is dense, green, springy underfoot and free of bare patches, it needs nothing beyond its regular feeds. Keep the rhythm going and enjoy it.
Organifer Tip: Diagnose the problem before choosing a product. A hungry lawn, tired soil, low pH and established moss all need different solutions.
How do you get to a lawn that needs less feeding?
Four habits, none of which cost anything.
Leave the clippings on
They return a real share of the nitrogen you applied and they feed the soil organisms doing the slow release work.
Mow higher, especially through summer
Longer leaf means more photosynthesis and deeper roots, and deeper roots reach water and nutrients you would otherwise have to supply. Never take more than a third of the leaf in one cut.
Keep the pH in range
So what is already in the soil stays available instead of locking up.
Build the soil rather than only feeding the plant
Organic matter and soil biology hold nutrients where roots can get them, which is the difference between a lawn you feed three times a year and one you feed twice and hardly notice. That is the direction every application moves you in. Feeding the grass is the short game. Building the soil under it is the one that lasts.
Organifer Tip: The long-term goal is not to keep adding more fertiliser. It is to build a lawn and soil system that gradually needs less intervention.
Still not sure what your lawn needs?
Email support@organifer.com with the size of the lawn, what you feed it and when, and what it looks like now.
