by Alec McClennan, on March 3, 2016
If you’re going to the store trying to decide what is the best organic lawn fertilizer this season, one of the organic product lines you’ll run into is Espoma. Espoma has been around for a long time and has been authentically involved in producing organic fertilizers since before it became a hot field. Some of their products are “bridge” or “organic-based lawn fertilizers” and not truly organic, but they do offer truly organic lawn fertilizers as well.
Espoma Organic Lawn Food is a 9-0-0 analysis and is designed for use on your lawn at any time of the year. If you’re going to use Espoma Organic Lawn Food, you’ll probably want to do 4 treatments per year using 5-10 pounds per thousand square feet with each treatment. In the Midwest, you can follow the Easter, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving schedule of applications. We recommend applying the heavier rate on Easter and Labor Day, while leaning towards the lighter rate on Memorial Day and Thanksgiving.
Espoma Only Has 2 Ingredients
Espoma Organic Lawn Food is made from 2 organic fertilizer ingredients. Feather Meal and Poultry Manure. The Poultry Manure is listed as pasteurized, which means that they heated it up to destroy any pathogens. The plus side of this is obvious, but the downside is that the pasteurization also kills good biological life that would really help your soil. A better method than pasteurization would be composting, which would also kill pathogens but would preserve more organisms. Espoma tries to solve that problem by adding beneficial bacteria back into the product. While this does help, it won’t provide the full array of microbes that composted poultry manure would provide.
Made From Poultry By-Products
It makes good sense to use all parts of the chicken and not waste them. From this perspective, it’s a great organic choice. Some organic fertilizers made from poultry by-products can have a strong odor, but it should dissipate within a day or two.
Good Nature Healthy Lawn Organic Fertilizer Alternatives
An alternative to Espoma Organic Lawn Fertilizer is our Good Nature Earth Turf Blends. We offer a Healthy Lawn Organic Fertilizer Spring & Summer and Healthy Lawn Organic Fertilizer Spring & Summer. Each blend contains Corn Gluten Meal, as well as plant-based ingredients, which can help suppress annual weed germination. So, the difference between Good Nature Healthy Lawn Organic Fertilizers and Espoma Organic Lawn Fertilizer is that Good Nature uses vegetable meals as the base source of protein and Espoma uses poultry by-products.
The advantage to Good Nature's Organic Fertilizers is that the vegetable protein meals offer some natural weed suppression and the vegetable meals are not animal based and don't have that smell you might associate with poultry litter fertilizer.
Granular Organic Lawn Fertilizers are heavy and a little bit expensive to ship, so if you can find a good source locally, that is a great bet. Just read the label.
