Along with abundant water and sunshine, one of the most important steps to take to keep your lawn lush and healthy is to maintain a proper PH Balance.
Maintaining your lawn’s PH balance helps ensure that it’s able to secure the key nutrients it needs to flourish and maintain its health. Having a proper pH balance allows your lawn to absorb fertilizer and other nutrients in the soil. There are a few ways to keep your lawn’s pH in a healthy balance, but it’s important to know what exactly pH balance is.
What is the right balance?
The simplest way of describing pH balance is as a scale to measure the alkalinity vs Acidity in your lawn’s soil. The pH scale ranges from 0 to 14, with most plants preferring to be near 7pH (the middle of the spectrum). Your lawn’s ideal PH balance is determined by which species of grass you have planted in your lawn, with most types of grasses falling between 5.8 and 7.2 pH. Determining your grasses pH balance can be achieved through the use of commercially available measurement tools.
How to test your lawn’s pH balance?
There are many products on the market that help you test and improve your lawn’s pH balance. They can be found at all of your local big-box retailers or agricultural supply stores, or even on Amazon. Different sections of your lawn will have different pH balances. The key to keeping your entire lawn healthy is to test multiple portions of your lawn, and then take the average of all the readings. Based on the average pH reading, there are a few common methods used to either increase or decrease your soil’s pH to bring it back into balance.
Achieving Balance
The balancing of your lawn’s pH can be achieved through the introduction of chemicals to the soil. Lime is introduced to raise your lawn’s PH balance, and sulfur is used to lower the PH balance of your lawn. These are the common ingredients in lawn pH balancing products.
Once you’ve taken the proper measurements, it’s time to adjust the pH by applying the respective solution to your pH problem. Espoma is a company that sells products to both raise and lower your lawn’s pH balance. If your lawn’s pH is too high, apply the sulfur solution, and if it’s too low, apply the lime solution to raise it.
Maintenance
How often should you check your soil’s pH balance? Every three to four years is a good frequency for keeping up with the pH health of your lawn. Once you’ve implanted the soil solution to bring your soil into balance, regular watering and fertilization should be enough to keep your lawn looking its best.
