Anyone using wood ash on the lawn?

[Charles Wiggins]

I've started collecting ash with the idea of using it in place of lime to amend our lawn. My problem is the coals that did not burn down into ash. They jam the spreader. Is the chemistry of the coals different because they burned less than the ash? Do I need to just screen them out and only use the lighter colored ash? Or is there a handy way to grind them up? Or another good use for them?

[Mel Fulks]

I sift them ,it's dusty .But easily done.They have a powerful effect so don't over apply .

[Sam Murdoch]

Don't have a lawn - we live in the woods - but wood ash is a great spread for anti slip on ice in the driveway (saw dust too).

[jared herbert]

Wood ash is good fertilizer. I put mine on the lawn all the time. I never worried about the big chunks, they seemed to just disappear or if big enuf the mower grinds them up. The p and k that is in the wood is still there it's not destroyed in the fire.

[Tom Fischer]

I put all the wood ash in my wife's veggie garden, chunks and all. Get's tilled in.
I've heard orchard guys say it does wonders for apple production.
Never tried putting it on the lawn, but should work fine, after screening.
Coal soot is "clean fill" but doesn't go in the garden. Different stuff.

[keith jensen]

Are you sure that you need to increase the ph of your lawn? In the past people limed their lawns just out of habit, not necessity. If you have done a soil test (about $20 at logan labs or umass) it will reveal if your lawn needs it. Unleached wood ash is extremely alkaline when mixed with small amounts of water, like ph of 10. It doesn't take much to make a big difference.
Assuming you need to increase your ph,try to do less than 5 lbs per 1000 square feet at a time up to three times per year. Retest your soil the following year to determine the effects of the amendments.
If you are trying to grow blueberries or anything else that likes acidic soils, keep the ash away from them. Predicting the actual increase in ph for a given amount of ash is difficult due to the interaction of the soil structure and other elements present in soils.
On a side note, sawdust is a decent organic addition to the lawn, not really fertilizer in the n-p-k sense but as in the addition of organic matter which is important for a healthy lawn.
My soil is already at a ph of 7.8 which is way harder to correct than a low ph. Your type of turf will also dictate the desired ph.

[Mel Fulks]

Good info, Keith. It's possible the ph is ok. Where I live the ground is so acid that people easily grow blueberries without soil altering.So it's difficult to get the ground sweet enuf for my lawn .When the grass does start to thrive ,I plan to monitor with tests.

[Kevin Bourque]

I burn wood all winter long. I spread the ashes on my lawn about once a week all winter and have not really noticed any difference in my lawn in the Spring between where I spread it and where I don't. The only caveat is not to spread too heavily in one area or it will burn the grass.

[Charles McKinley]

Putting sawdust on the lawn it will lock up nitrogen until the cellulose breaks down. It you want to add it to the yard it needs to be well composted first. Work lots of grass clippings into the compost and keep it damp.

[keith jensen]

You don't need to compost sawdust at all before you spread it on the lawn. Sawdust will pull nitrogen from the air while decomposing, the nitrogen deficiency resulting from placing sawdust directly on the soil is minor. If you work sawdust into the soil it will wind up robbing nitrogen from the soil since it is not in direct contact with air. The microbes in the soil will take much longer to process the sawdust when you first start using sawdust as organic matter. This assumes you continue with a mostly organic turf maintenance schedule.
Synthetic fertilizers and insecticides take a large toll on the microbes that process organic matter. Sawdust also adds carbon which helps to balance the ratio of carbon to nitrogen resulting in an increased microbe population.
You will notice that as you continue to add sawdust, the time it takes to break it down gets shorter each time. The microbe population is now balancing itself for the type of organic matter you provided it. Adding slow release forms of nitrogen also helps to maintain the balance of carbon and nitrogen.
Charles mentioned compost which is spectacular at adding organic matter and microbes to the soil! You can add compost directly onto your turf all the way up to the crowns of the turf without smothering it. Make sure that the compost you use is completely processed or you could introduce various weeds to your lawn though.
Also mulch mowing will aid in the process including mulching leaves in the fall.
All of this applies to cool season turf, I don't know squat about warm season turfs but I assume the same principles would apply.

[Ted Calver]

I use compost to top dress after plug aerating my lawn. Highly recommended.

[Ryan Mooney]

My soil is already at a ph of 7.8 which is way harder to correct than a low ph. Your type of turf will also dictate the desired ph.

Interesting I found the opposite true, but that may well be due to the amendments I was trying to use and other soil characteristics.

I had one garden in soil that was ~close to yours (depending on where you read 7.8 to 8.0) and it took me about a year to bring it up to snuff - for a garden. It was alkali and sandy, I could see it being perhaps different if the soil had a high clay content? Most of the amendments I would normally add (manure, most fertilizers) are acidic so they naturally pushed the soil in the right direction.

When I moved and had a new plot that was extremely acidic, ph was 5.2-5.4 and I had a much harder time getting it to a work stage. Everything i used to raise the PH (primarily lime) also robbed nitrogen so I had to add more nitrogen sources which lowered the ph leaving me in a nasty back and forth until I managed to get enough organics entrained in the soil to act as a buffer.

If you have a solution for raising the PH that doesn't mess with the nitrogen balance that would be very useful to know.

[Mel Fulks]

Ryan ,I know some of the older info said that putting lime and fertilizer down at the same time caused a release of nitrogen into the air,that has been proven to be wrong. The radio guy ( a phd) I listen to stresses slow release fertilizer over such things as 10-10-10 and says lime can be put down at any time. That's important because often you can't put down enough at one time to bring the ph up to where it needs to be for grass. Difficult to get a "best in neighborhood " lawn without sweet soil.

[Ryan Mooney]

Ryan ,I know some of the older info said that putting lime and fertilizer down at the same time caused a release of nitrogen into the air,that has been proven to be wrong. The radio guy ( a phd) I listen to stresses slow release fertilizer over such things as 10-10-10 and says lime can be put down at any time. That's important because often you can't put down enough at one time to bring the ph up to where it needs to be for grass. Difficult to get a "best in neighborhood " lawn without sweet soil.

Yeah I'm not even close to being a chemist so I don't claim to know exactly what was happening :D All I can offer is the bit I observed. My end conclusion was pretty much just as you say; if your PH is fubar the rest of it didn't matter to much as most of the other nutrients end up not being available to the plants even if they are there in the soil.

We had bought a set of soil test kits that were for schools or scouts that were pretty cheap and came in a box of 25 test sets (with a full NPK and ph titration set for each) so I had opportunity to do plenty of testing while adding stuff to the acid soil and found that adding the lime caused the apparent (available) nitrogen to drop fairly precipitously (as measured by the test kit). It would go back up over time though as everything balanced out so I could certainly believe you that it was there but just not available for whatever reason.

This was supported by the (lack of) color of the plants which were a delightfully uniform yellow with white patches looking essentially nitro starved. Once I got the PH closer to neutral it all starter working a lot better but that took me a solid two years to get there. At this point I don't know if it was the organics we added that buffered it enough or the vast quantities of lime I dumped in the first year finally integrated and the chemistry worked itself out.

I ended up using unreal amounts of lime (added in batches over the year something along the lines of ~100lbs for a 20x20 area) to get the ph to move at all (there was also a lot of bark in the "dirt" which I'm sure didn't help) and then added a lot of organic materials over the fall winter plus several rounds of tilled in cover crops and it ended up mostly working not to bad.

[Mel Fulks]

He also is a big proponate of compost and other organic matter as a " buffer" in cases of ph imbalance.I could never get anything to grow until I started listening to his radio shoe. He has also written some books. Look up Andre Viette.

[Ryan Mooney]

Thanks, I found his inthegardenradio page; looks like lots of good stuff there (although he clearly has a marketing relationship with espoma, its easy to translate as most of the minerals he talks about are widely available other places as well :D).