Yellow stalks, brown spots or a fading green: lawn damage annoys every gardener. We show you how to identify and remedy the individual defects in good time.
A lush green lawn is the flagship of any garden. All the more annoying when it shows brown spots or yellow discoloration. What many gardeners don't know is that the spread of moss or fungi often has to do with a lack of nutrients. After all, a well-supplied, healthy lawn is not so easy to displace by other plants.
Standing up to lawn damage: Main nutrients – the "daily bread" of plants
Yellow spots in the lawn can have several causes: for example, nitrogen or iron deficiency or dog urine. © imagebroker/Imago
We humans need our staple foods such as potatoes and bread, which are the main nutrients for plants. First of all, the so-called NPK, i.e. nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K). Without these three substances, hardly any plant can survive. Your lawn also needs them – just like you need bread to live. Nitrogen is particularly important. It stimulates the growth of the lawn plants and ensures a dense and attractive lawn carpet.
Trace nutrients – the vitamin C for your lawn
In order to repair lawn damage, some trace nutrients are still needed. The main ones are magnesium, calcium and iron. They can be compared well with the vitamins in us humans. No matter how much bread you eat a day, if you don't eat some fruit regularly, you'll soon get scurvy. This is because sailor's disease is caused by a permanent vitamin deficiency. And so even an otherwise wonderfully well-supplied lawn turns yellow if it lacks iron.
What nutrients are needed to prevent lawn damage?
Luckily, you don't have to be a botanist to provide your lawn with the right mix of nutrients. There is a whole range of ready-made fertilizer mixtures on the market that are specially tailored to the needs of lawns. However, be sure to use special lawn fertilizer (promotional link) and not a general garden fertilizer. With garden fertilizer, the main nutrients are composed differently, which can harm your lawn. It is best to use organic lawn fertilizer. This allows you to achieve a good long-term effect and enrich the soil with valuable humus. In addition, you will not be able to over-fertilize your lawn as easily as with mineral fertilizer.
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If you want to take care of your lawn in a particularly individual way, take a soil sample and have it analysed in a laboratory: this usually costs no more than 30 euros. In addition, you can get ready-made soil test kits at the hardware store. Then you can match your lawn fertilizer exactly to your soil and successfully prevent lawn damage.
Lawn damage such as yellow spots or brown spots: What is your lawn missing?
If your greenery is still not running smoothly and you discover yellow spots or brown spots in the lawn, try to classify the signs correctly first. This is the only way to react quickly and remedy the defect in time. Some damage patterns can be attributed to a nutrient deficiency at first glance, others are more difficult to detect or even easily confused with each other.
- Pale green, slow growth: If the lawn grasses lose their lush green and appear pale, there is most likely too little nitrogen in the soil. The lawn also grows very slowly and needs to be mowed less frequently. Some grasses get red tips. A severe lack of nitrogen leads to gaps in the lawn, which are soon colonized by moss or wild herbs. In extreme cases, your lawn will turn completely yellow and stop growing. Beware of confusion: Grass that has been burned by the sun or that is too dry can also look very similar. In this case, you should water after dusk instead of giving nitrogen.
- Yellow spots in the lawn: If, on the other hand, the stalks turn clearly yellow, there may be an iron deficiency. Your lawn needs iron to produce the green chlorophyll. That is why iron is added to most fertilizers to maintain a particularly green lawn. Iron deficiency is best recognized by the fact that the veins of the leaves remain green longer than the edge area. In addition, the discoloration occurs first on the younger stalks, while a nitrogen deficiency affects the older stalks first. But beware: Often there is enough iron in the soil when there is a lack of iron. But with a high pH of the soil, waterlogging or drought, it is not available to plants. So before you fertilize with iron, you should first create the right conditions in the soil.
- Brown spots in the lawn: If individual sections of the lawn turn brown or look burnt, you have most likely given your lawn too much of a good thing. Unfortunately, the damage caused by over-fertilization is often more difficult to eliminate than a deficiency. Therefore, you should always adhere to the dosage recommendation on the packaging of the fertilizer. Mineral fertilizer should even be dosed a little lower than recommended, with organic fertilizer an overdose is not quite as harmful.
- Once the lawn is burned, there is unfortunately little you can do. Water the lawn thoroughly, without drowning it. This allows you to flush some of the excess nutrients into deeper soil, where the lawn roots can no longer reach. After that, you should definitely reduce the intake of nutrients. If possible, use a spreader, which allows you to distribute the fertilizer much more accurately than by hand.
