It's a good report. You should understand that it's probably standard for your neighborhood, and not standard for my neighborhood, but all of my neighborhood shares the same general soil characteristics, as does yours, but they are different.

1. You built in a hayfield. That means the bacteria, the mychorrizal fungus, the tiny critters, that live on the most common plant in the area, while taking over, have not yet successfully transitioned from 'field' to 'lawn', but they're working on it. I'm tempted, at first, to just leave it, but you might get ahold of a company like Bio-Vam, and order up a dose of mychorrizal fungus,and spray it on your lawn. It really did help me out, a few years back. Reach me here, if you decide to do this, I can give you a few tips.

2. The lawn does not have enough organic matter, which surprises me, given that you have 2 acres. I'm assuming you leave the lawn clippings on the lawn. Are you mowing high? You should. Mowing at 3.5 to 4 inches will really help that lawn keep organic matter. I had a pal talk to me, two acres, and it turned out he was mowing at one inch, literally, and it looked like a pool table, with an unshaven stubble: he will never have a lawn. Mow high.

3. Ignore the potash. It's not really a deficiency, and will change, over the next five years. Keep the report, as we're going to compare 'next year's' report to this one.

4. Don't add fert that has any, or not much, phosphorus.

For TODAY, not three weeks from now, if you can add a half-dose of urea, I would. Keep this in mind: if you are un-disciplined, or not mechanical, or somehow overwhelmed by this job, just pass on the job: no offense taken. If a normal application of fertilizer would be a 6 on your tow-behind spreader, I'd like you to get some urea, and spread it around, almost immediately, using a setting of 3. You can't do a full dose, you have to do a half dose. A full dose, with summer almost upon us, would burn the lawn, and we don't want that. But a half dose would be perfect. Urea is something like 30-0-0, or 45-0-0, and it's all nitrogen, no phosphorus, no potash. But it has to be a light dose.

Lime: Is best put down over several small applications, spread out by at least three weeks, rather than one big boomba application. You always, always, want pelletized. It flows, just like fertilizer, through your tow behind rotary spreader. For two acres, go over to H/D or Lowes, and get six bags, three for each acre. Throw it on the lawn. Eight to twelve bags per acre would be mathmatically correct, and you are not remotely interested. Solve that small problem one small step at a time. By the way, we're going to do another application, either in late fall, or early spring.

Let me say this: you are at that wonderful stage, at the beginning, where almost everything you do will be correct, will show an immediate improvement, and even better, will improve MORE after that. Take this stuff in slow, rather than big, stages or applications. Give the lawn time to be a lawn.

Mow tall, rather than short.
You probably want a tow-behind boom sprayer (I LOVE mine) for a few hundred, to put down weed killer or liquid fert. Shop around, and reach me here if you're not finding what you need.

Do not add phosphorus, or add darn little.

Ignore the potash, it's fine.

Let us know, here, what you're doing. You're gonna love this job.

@philes21 thank you much for the detailed input.

-the mychorrizal fungus sounds interesting. i'd be interested in learning more (suppose i should do a search on here) of your input and experience with it. is it put down with a boom sprayer? expensive for a lawn my size?

-we mow high and leave the clippings on the lawn w/ the exception of a some of the more lush areas which have been growing faster than we can mow it and maintain our 40+ hour/week jobs. if there are piles i take them to the compost - otherwise they stay.

-potash is history. won't even think of it again. 8-)

-okay, about the urea. we have a 3-point PTO driven broadcast spreader. i'm assuming when you stated to apply at a rate of 3, for example, that would be considered a 'light dose' in comparison to a rate of 6? thus a 'half dose'? again, i have no experience with urea so pardon my nievity. is it expensive? easy to get, say at a local nursery? maybe put it down on a day rain is forecast for the following day/evening?

-the lime sounds easy enough, and i know menards/lowes has it cheap and in stock!

i'm ready to roll on all of this (even have my wife on board), just need a little more input.

i've been looking for a reason to get a boom sprayer, and now i definitely have one - thanks!

thanks again for the rapid & thorough response.

lane

also, we have to dogs that love to run & wrestle on the lawn. would urea &/or lime be unhealthy for them to be trotting around in? if so, how long should i keep them off the lawn after it's layed down?

i got a quote of ~$20 for a 50# bag of urea from our local seed/feed mill. any clue as to how much i may need for a 'light' application on ~2.5 acres?

thanks again for any input!

Your %OM is desperately low. Like philes says you're at the beginning and mulch mowing high is probably the single best thing you can do over time to correct your soil on that much space. On a smaller lot I'd think about top dressing compost but not on more than an acre. Myco isn't a bad thought but with such low OM its hard to see how its going to help much anytime soon.

A dose of urea isn't going to hurt anything but you might want to start thinking about organic fertilizers as well.
With low pH and poor organic mattter its hard to imagine you've got any microbial activity in the soil to speak of.
OM is going to feed the little soil critters that are going to eventually start doing the heavy lifting thats going to turn your lawn around

As for the dogs, whenever using synthetic fertilizers it's often best to keep them off the lawn until after a good rainfall or until after you've had a chance to water it in thoroughly however, having a small dog myself I just suffice with brushing them off with an old towel when they're done doing their thing.

Lawn nut that I am, I have convinced my dog that she's only allowed to go potty in one spot in the yard that has been designated as her "potty spot". Hopefully she'll live forever because I don't think I'll ever pull that trick off again, lol.

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As for the bits about the "light dose" what we're really looking for here is a 0.5 lbs. of nitrogen added to the soil as a fertilizer. Normally you would apply 1.0 lbs. of nitrogen per feeding but in summer months with cool-season grasses we go light on fertilization because over-fertilization can burn the grass...but more importantly it will cause the grass to grow more top-growth leafs and slow down / stop growth of rhizomes which promotes healthy root structures...which is essential to weathering the summer heat.

So, in order to figure out how much fertilizer to apply to get 0.5 lbs of actual nitrogen out on the ground we have to look at the numbers on the bag as well as know how many square feet we're dealing with in for the application.

2.5 acres is a little over 108,000 sq. ft. but I tend to round down for safety and practicality. It's a lot easier to assume that your house, driveway, and garden beds eats up about 8,000 sq. ft. of that 2.5 acres than it is to have you go out there with a measuring tape and get us an exact figure. If you think you have significantly less than 100,000 sq. ft. of lawn, feel free to measure it out for a reality check...

Now, on to the fertilizer. The bags list their nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) by percentage of bagged weight by way of the three numbers you see on the front of the bag. 34-0-0 means that 34% of the fertilizer, by weight, is pure nitrogen.

To figure how much of this fertilizer you will need to apply 1.0 lbs of nitrogen you would take your application area and divide it by that first number...and then divide that result by 10.

100,000 sq. ft. / 34 = 2941
2941 / 10 = 294.1

So it would 294.1 lbs. of 34-0-0 urea to apply 1.0 lbs. of pure nitrogen to your lawn. Since we're only going to apply have that much you'd need 147.05 lbs total, or three 50 lbs. bags.

Remember when you apply this stuff, you want to do so in such a manner that it takes you two complete passes that are perpendicular to each other. One vertically, and one horizontally - for lack of a better term. Trying to lay it all down all at once in one pass - even with this light "half dose" will leave you with striping on your lawn.

As far as the application rate goes, it can get kind of tricky measuring out the feed rate of your spreader based on make and model and it gets over my head but I pretty sure I got the math right on how much you're actually trying to put down in terms of pounds... ;-p

Hope some of that helped anyways...

Perennial rye will need to be overseeded to maintain a full and thick sod. Do you mechanically aerate? You may want to consider this fall a core aeration and overseeding to fix the bare and thinning spots and reduce the weed population.

If you are concerned with pets in the lawn, you might want to apply one or more applications of organic fertilizer every year. I like ordinary corn meal, but soybean meal, alfalfa pellets, cottonseed meal, flax seed meal, or any ground grain you can get cheap works very well. The disadvantage of organics for large lawns is the weight of the organic fertilizer compared to the weight of chemical fertilizer. With a tractor the weight is much less of an issue. The application rate is 10-20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. You would need about 20 bags. Get a full pallet at a discount and use it all this season.

The advantage of using one app of organic is that it helps bring in the critters that help you take care of your lawn. You will have more birds, lizards, and toads eating insects so you won't even be tempted to use insecticide. Since you are mowing high your weeds will be minimal so you should not be tempted to use herbicide. That's what your pets want - no chemicals.

update:

about 2 weeks ago we layed down six 40# bags of nutralime and 150# of slow-release 47-0-0 as suggested. we've had several soaking/heavy rains each week. the lawn is greening up dramatically and the sparse areas are filling in. we've been mowing high once/week.

we're happy with the results, but sort of feel like we've simply put a bandaid on the real problem --> low amounts of organic material. we'd love to top dress the entire lawn w/ compost after a fall aeration, but this would be quite a financial undertaking. i guess corn / soybean / etc. meal would be the way to go, but how expensive is it per bag? is a simple top dressing the best method or would applying after aeartion be better?

i saw a 'bluebird' brand walk behind core aerator on craigslist (10 years old) for $250. i'm not sure how much it would be to pay a service to core aerate our 2.5 acres, but i'd bet it would be cheaper to own one.

now for my next step. should i plan on a fall application of lime & urea? should i get another analysis before taking further steps?

again, your advice is greatly appreciated!

lane

Well done!

You didn't apply a band aid, you laid out a straight line, and built the foundation. You even laid down one course of brick. (After you put down another twenty courses, you'll have a very nice brick wall there, built on a solid foundation, to stretch this metaphor to its limits).

Here's what you did: applied lime, and the PH will improve. A gentle change in Ph, in the right direction, which the lawn will appreciate. We'll do it again in September, after the heat breaks. And the lawn will love it more.

The nitrogen will be used by the lawn: but it can't. The lawn cannot use the nitrogen without using up phosphorus at the same time, and it surely will do that. Since you had too much phosphorus, the urea was perfect. As that urea gets used up, your background level of phosphorus will go down, because some of the phosphorus just got used up while the lawn was using the nitrogen/urea.

There's a problem with urea: if you over apply it, or it gets really hot out, you can burn the lawn. So that application needed to go down before it gets hot. Your timing was perfect, and no, we're not putting any more urea down on the 4th of July.

We will, however, be putting down more urea come mid September, and again on one of the first three days of November. (And more phosphorus, sure enough, will go away). Two applications, six weeks apart, and most of that last application will be actually used in the Spring. You're really on to something here.

So now, how do we get you through the hot weather, and how do we get you some more organic material on that lawn? You'll be having more clippings now (because your lawn is producing more), but we can add a bit more fertilizer, if it's organic in some sense: you can use the grains, or you can use Milorganite or some other sewage-sludge based fertilizer. They, all of them, add a little nitrogen, and add a little phosphorus: it can't be avoided. Your lawn will love it. They also add organic material. And since we needed organic material, what a happy coincidence.

So I would recommend that you put down some grains, if you want that approach, or put down some Milorganite, on July 1st (neither will burn the lawn: they provide nitrogen as they rot. I'm sorry, I meant to say 'naturally decompose'). Do it again on August 1st.

Come September, we're switching back to urea, as mentioned above.

And you're set. That's your program for the year.

philes21 - thanks for the in depth response, once again.

your assistance is truly appreciated - couldn't express how much!

any idea how much milorganite i'd require?

any input into my aeration situation (sounds funny!)?

we feel much better about everything, especially the feeling that we have a 'plan'. plans are good - and we'll follow through with it as we've started seeing the 'pay off' already.