How the State’s New Fertilizing Rules Affect Your Lawn Care
November 1st, 2022
Runoff from farms and factories is a key source of water pollution that ends up draining into the Chesapeake Bay, where it’s long harmed the health of aquatic life.
New state rules dictate when and how much fertilizer can be applied to lawns.
But runoff from the fertilizers that go on our ample acreage of home lawns also is a contributor – an estimated 14 percent of the total going into the Bay.
After nearly a dozen years of consideration, Pennsylvania’s state legislature in July passed a set of rules that dictate what kind and how much fertilizer people can apply to their lawn and when they can and can’t apply it.
The rules are similar to ones that several nearby states already have had for years, including Maryland and Virginia.
The rules aren’t so heavy-handed that they’re going to end the days of green-carpet aspirations. They don’t even get into the use of herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides, for example.
Rather, the rules are aimed at curbing the use of fertilizers that aren’t needed. And they apply to homeowners fertilizing their own lawns as well as lawn-care companies and professionals fertilizing park lawns, golf courses, and athletic fields.
For starters, the new rules prohibit the application of any nitrogen- or phosphorus-containing lawn fertilizer between Dec. 15 and March 1… or any other time the ground is frozen to a depth of at least two inches or when snow-covered.
Lawn fertilizer containing phosphorus is prohibited altogether, unless a soil test or other specific documentation shows that the lawn needs it. Most lawn fertilizers already have dropped phosphorus as an ingredient since most soils have enough of this nutrient to adequately grow grass.
