 My name is Neil Kelly. I'm a regional extension agent in the wire grass area. That's the southeast corner of the state. I cover about 10 counties. I work with all the commercial horticultural crops, all your fruit, vegetable, tree crops, small berries, as well as pecan and turf grass. So today I'm just going to very quickly run through some basics, if you will, about turf grass fertilization. I'd like to give credit to Dr. Dave Hahn for a few of these slides and as well as one of my counterparts, Chip East. I just kind of went through several different presentations and robbed some slides and just going to give you kind of the nuts and bolts, if you will, of turf grass fertilization and then open it for questions. So I guess the thing that we'll start with first is, you know, when to fertilize? When should you start fertilizing? And I guess the short answer would be is that you want your turf grass to be actively growing, you know, for your warm season grasses, that's your Bermuda grasses, centipede, your zoysia, your hybrid Bermudas. That's all going to be typically in the spring, late spring, early summer, maybe early fall application. Now, if you've come in and you overseed in the cool season with annual ryegrass, then obviously you're looking at kind of a fall winter type fertilizer application. But what we're looking for is we're looking for the turf grass to be actively growing when we get out there and start making fertilizer applications. You know, a few things to kind of keep in mind, avoid the temptation to over fertilize. That can lead to some issues and I'll mention those shortly, but, you know, you get the excessive foliage growth from application of nitrogen and a lot of times that comes at the expense of your root system. You can also run into pollution issues or runoff issues and the way prices are today, it's just a flat waste of money to over fertilize. We're going to have to be really good stewards with our fertilizer programs this year to keep from wasting a lot of money. And talking about fertility, there's three numbers that always comes to mind. That's the NP and K, that's the big three, if you will, of the nutrients, that's those micronutrients, there's a few more, but the NP and K are the three that you always see on the front of the bag of fertilizer. And that's giving you the percent nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium that is contained in that bag of fertilizer. You know, your P and K recommendations are going to come based off of a soil test. So what does that mean? That means we need to take a soil sample. You know, I wouldn't be an extension agent if I didn't mention soil sampling at least once in the presentation. So get out there at the start of the year, be sure to take those soil samples. You can collect those and carry them by your local county office. We will help you get those to Auburn if we can or we can tell you who to mail them to. And so we can help you with that. It's very simple. It's a $7 test at the soil lab in Auburn. And it gives us a lot of really valuable information about your soil type and condition and fertility that's there. And the soil test report that you get back will make the P and K recommendations based off of what that test shows them. Now, the only one there, the nitrogen. The nitrogen is just a straight recommendation. That comes based off of research that's been done in the past that comes off of known crop needs. So the nitrogen, we don't test for soil nitrogen at the lab. That number fluctuates very readily. So the nitrogen recommendation is going to be based off of just research and known crop needs. This is a table that I pulled out of one of our publications for a fertilization schedule for lawn grasses. Most of what we run into in the lawn is going to be a Bermuda grass, either a common or a hybrid centipede to St. Augustine or either a zoysia type grass, at least in the southern part of the state. And you can see there, they have that first application in May, and I just kind of want to point that out. We get a lot of calls this time of year. People want to know what deferred lives and when to get started. You know, the signs of spring are here and weather's getting a little warmer and people are ready to jump out and start fertilizing, but right now we are still in a transitional period with our turf grasses, especially with the cool weather that we've had lately. So now it's still a little too early to get out there and fertilize. We would like to wait at least until May when our turf is through this transition period, it is fully greened up and the turf is actively growing. On your Bermuda grass, and you're looking around a unit and around three units for the year. And if you'll notice that's only per thousand square feet area. So three units per thousand square feet for the area for the year. Centipede is much lower and the centipede grass is a lot of what we have in the home lawns. So if you'll notice, we're only looking at one unit per thousand for the year. So that's going to be very small applications each time. If we split that into two applications, May and July, you're only looking at a half a unit per thousand. So keep that in mind when you get out there to fertilize, especially with your centipedes. What are some of the different sources of our nitrogen fertilizer? You know, there's a world of different fertilizer products out there when you go to Lowe's or Home Depot or any of your hardware stores, there would just be aisles and aisles and bags and bags of different types of fertilizers. So obviously we have organic fertilizers. If you choose to use an organic type product, you have your standard inorganic or your regular blended fertilizers. There's soluble fertilizers, things like Miracle Grow Powder that you dissolve in water that you could spray out. There's also slow release. And that's kind of a popular type fertilizer with homeowners, but I will point out that with slow release, you need to be careful about the slow release. Some of those cheaper slow release products, they work because that pril of fertilizers encapsulated in a layer of sulfur. And so there's a lot of different things that factor into how quickly that fertilizer breaks down. Sometimes you get very little fertilizer until that sulfur coating breaks down and then you'll get this really big flush of fertilizer. So the science on some of those products is not quite where it should be. Now with that being said, there are some really good slow release materials out there and they are coated with a polymer coating. And it is much better coating than what the original sulfur coated fertilizers were, but now it's going to be a much more expensive fertilizer. A lot of times they're only utilized golf courses and maybe really high end type areas, but they are available, but just pay attention to that with a slow release. There's a lot of different factors that play there as to how well that product is really going to slow release. A few little general minders that I'll leave you with. Hey, don't fertilize too early. We talked about that. We want to make sure that everything is in full green up before we start to fertilize. I tell people be careful when using weed and feed products. We get a lot of calls about weed and feed products and that is a fertilizer that has some type of herbicide mixed in with it. One of the problems with some of these weed and feed products is that a lot of times that's a pre-emergent type herbicide. Well, if we wait till the 1st of May to fertilize our grass when we actually need to be fertilizing the grass, a lot of our weeds have already sprouted. So it may be too late for the weed side of that product to work. On the other hand, if we put that product out early and get full benefits of the herbicide that's in there, then we may be wasting the fertilizer. And then you also got to keep in mind that that is for a set amount. In other words, you've got to be real close to how much you're putting out, real close to that recommended rate because if you over-apply these products, you can cause herbicide injury from over-applying these products as well as fertilizer burn to the root system. So I've never been a big fan of weed and feed products. I'm not one to recommend a lot of weed and feed products, but if they do have their place and if they work for you and you like to use those, then that's great. I just urge you to be careful and cautious and make sure that you stick to that label on that bag when using that product. As I mentioned earlier, don't over-fertilize. That really leads to a lot of problems, especially in centipede grass. I tell people to have realistic expectations for their turf grass. Again, I'll mention centipede and the reason I throw centipede out there is because I get a lot of people who call and they say their centipede is kind of yellowish looking or is real light green in color and they want that really dark rich deep green grass. And thing is, is that's just not centipede grass. If every time centipede grass starts to get a little bit of a washed out look to it, you get out there and keep adding fertilizer and adding fertilizer, you're going to cause a lot of issues in your centipede yard. Centipede grass is kind of like what we refer to as a poor man's grass, if you will. Sometimes best thing you can do with centipede is to leave it alone, but it's not a really deep dark green luscious looking grass. So just be mindful of that. I hear a lot of people talk about application of iron to centipede to cause it to green up. Yes, it will, but that is a temporary type thing. It's not going to stay green very long. If you go out and make another application of iron to turn it green again, you get into this issue where we're just constantly applying liquid iron to our yard to make it look green and that can lead to problems as well. Another one that I want to briefly mention is healthy turf requires sunlight. I get a lot of calls about thinning turf. People having a hard time growing turf in the yard and I go make a visit. And the first thing I'll notice is that they're trying to grow turf grass under a bunch of oak trees. It just doesn't work that way. Turf likes full sunlight and heavy shaded areas. You're not going to get a really good, healthy stand of turf grass. That's just the nature of grass. The same reason if you walk through the woods, you don't see a lot of grass growing in thick woods because it likes the sunlight. So, you know, just have some realistic expectations for the type of grass that you have and for your particular situation. And I tell people to stick to the basics. You know, what does grass like? What does grass respond well to? Grass responds well to mowing and it responds well to water. So if there was only two or three things that I could do, I would do light fertilizing. I would mow regularly and I would water during times of drought. So, you know, stick to the basics and I think you can avoid a lot of problems throughout the year. This is just the last little slide here. It shows what you can do to centipede grass. That plot received four pounds of nitrogen per thousand square feet for the year. That's what, three and a half times, around three and a half times over. What we recommend, we recommend a half a pound per thousand in a split application. So one pound per thousand for the year. That's at four times that rate at four pounds per thousand. And you can see the thinning that it causes in the turf grass. It causes an excess of thatch. You start to get all type of disease issues. You get infestation of bugs. You get a lot of change bugs, spittle bugs, things like that. So over fertilization can lead to some real issues in turf grass. That's just a little brief rundown. If you have any other questions, feel free to reach out to myself for your local extension agent. We're all here and we'd be more than happy to help in any way that we can.