Organic liquid lawn feed: a natural, plant-derived high nitrogen 7-2-3
This organic liquid lawn feed is a natural, plant-derived fertiliser: a high nitrogen NPK 7-2-3. Its nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium are recovered from plant material and held in solution, so the grass can use them straight away. It greens a lawn quickly, the way a mineral feed does, but at a fraction of the salt. That means far less risk of scorching the grass, and a feed that is kinder to the soil and the life underneath it.
The 7-2-3 ratio is built for turf. Grass is grown for its leaves, not its flowers or fruit, and leaves run on nitrogen, so a lawn wants a feed that leads with N and keeps phosphorus low. That is exactly what this is: seven parts nitrogen to two of phosphorus and three of potassium, with the potassium there to toughen the plant and help it stand up to drought, wear and cold.
It is made without mining and without fossil-fuel nitrogen. Ordinary lawn feeds get their nitrogen from natural gas and their potassium and phosphorus from mined rock. This one recovers its nutrients from plant material that would otherwise go to waste.
It contains no weedkillers, mosskillers or bug killers. It is a plant food, not a pesticide, so it is safe to use around children, pets, bees and birds when used as directed. Keep everyone off the lawn until the feed has been watered in and the grass is dry.
What it helps with
- Pale, yellow or tired grass, where the usual cause is a shortage of nitrogen, which this feed leads on
- A quick pick-me-up, because a liquid is the fastest kind of feed, so colour usually improves within a week or two while the grass is growing
- Thin, patchy lawns, since regular feeding thickens the grass, and a denser sward leaves less bare ground for moss and weeds to move into
- Steady colour without a growth surge, because a light, little-and-often dose greens the lawn without forcing the soft, sappy growth (and extra mowing) that heavy feeds cause
- After overseeding or scarifying, where a light feed once new grass is established helps it settle in
- The whole garden, not just the lawn, as it is a general plant food, so the same bottle feeds beds, borders, pots and vegetables at the same dilution
- Pleasant to use, with virtually no smell, and none of the fishy or farmyard odour that puts people off many organic feeds
How to use the lawn feed: dilution, cost and coverage
This is a concentrated liquid, not a ready-to-use spray. Shake the bottle, measure the feed into a watering can, top up with water and pour it evenly over the lawn through a rose (the sprinkler head on the spout). Then water it in, or feed just before light rain, so the nutrients wash down to the roots instead of drying on the leaf.
How much to use
Feeding a lawn
That works out at a light, even feed. Using a big 9 litre can, mix 100 ml and cover about 12–14 m². Water it in afterwards. A lawn fed this way, little and often, gets six to eight feeds across a season. Because this is a high nitrogen 7-2-3, a given bottle covers noticeably more ground than a weaker liquid feed at the same dose.
What it costs to feed your lawn
The bigger the bottle, the less each feed costs. Here is what each pack covers and what it works out at per square metre, at the feeding rate above.
| Pack size | Price | Per litre | Covers per feed | A full season for a lawn up to | Cost per m², each feed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 500 ml | £15.00 | £30.00 | ~65 m² | ~9 m² | ~23p |
| 1 litre | £22.50 | £22.50 | ~130 m² | ~19 m² | ~17p |
| 5 litres | £70.00 | £14.00 | ~665 m² | ~95 m² | ~11p |
Shorter bar means cheaper per square metre. The 5 litre works out at less than half the price of the 500 ml, feed for feed.
A typical small back-garden lawn is around 25 m². One feed uses roughly 190 ml, and a season is six to eight feeds, so about 1.3 litres a year. That makes the 1 litre a sensible season's supply for a small lawn, the 500 ml a good size to try it out or to top up a couple of times, and the 5 litre the one to buy for a bigger lawn (it covers up to about 95 m² for a full season) or to keep a small lawn fed for several years. Not sure of your lawn size? Pace the length and the width in strides (a stride is about a metre) and multiply the two.
Feeding it, step by step
- Shake the bottle well. A little settling is normal in a plant-derived liquid.
- Measure the feed into the watering can. 50 ml for a small (4.5 litre) can, 100 ml for a large (9 litre) one.
- Top up with water and give it a stir.
- Pour it evenly over the lawn through a rose. Aim for even, all-over cover with no puddles.
- Water it in, or feed just before light rain, so the feed reaches the roots.
- Repeat every three to four weeks from spring to early autumn. See the Calendar tab for timing.
There are no pesticides in this feed, nothing to kill weeds, moss or insects, so it is safe to use around children, pets, bees and birds. As with any garden product, keep children and pets off the lawn until the feed has been watered in and the grass has dried, and store the bottle closed and out of their reach.
Gardening words, in plain English
- NPK / 7-2-3
- The three main plant nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) and the percentage of each. Here: 7% nitrogen, 2% phosphorus, 3% potassium.
- High nitrogen
- A feed that leads on nitrogen, the nutrient grass uses most, because a lawn is grown for its leaves rather than its flowers or fruit.
- Watering in
- Rinsing the feed off the grass blades and down to the roots with plain water, or letting rain do it.
- Scorch
- Brown, burnt-looking patches caused by feed that is too strong, or by feeding grass that is dry. Easily avoided by sticking to the dilution and watering in.
- Little and often
- Small, regular feeds rather than one big dose. Kinder to the grass and gives steadier colour.
- Overseeding
- Sowing fresh grass seed into an existing lawn to thicken it up.
- Scarifying
- Raking out the dead moss and thatch that build up at the base of the grass.
- m² (square metre)
- How lawn area is measured. A small back lawn is often 20–40 m².
Prefer a spread-and-forget feed? Our Organic Lawn Fertiliser 10-3-3.5 is a slow-release granular grass feed. Scatter it a few times a season for a bigger, longer-lasting boost. This liquid is its faster, gentler partner: reach for the granular as the main seasonal feed, and this for quick colour and light, little-and-often top-ups in between.
Pair it with Scottish Seaweed after scarifying or overseeding, where the seaweed helps roots settle and cope with dry spells; Granulated Rock Dust to remineralise tired lawn soil over the longer term; and Sulphate of Potash for an autumn potassium feed that toughens the grass up before winter. New to lawn feeding? Our guide to high nitrogen lawn feed explains how much grass really needs, and when to ease off.
Your lawn feeding calendar: when to start, when to stop
If you have never fed a lawn before, timing is the part that matters most, and it is simpler than it sounds. Grass only uses feed when it is actively growing, so you feed through the warmer months and rest it over autumn and winter. As a rule: start in spring once the grass is growing again, feed every three to four weeks, and stop by the end of September.
* Skip a feed during drought or heatwaves. Feeding dry, stressed grass can scorch it. Wait until it has been watered or rain returns.
Simple test: if you are mowing it, it is growing, and it is ready to feed. In most of the UK that means starting around April, when the soil is warm enough (about 8°C), and finishing in September. Colder or northern gardens run a little later at each end.
Nitrogen pushes leafy growth. Late in the year that soft new growth does not have time to harden before the cold and damp arrive, which invites lawn disease and frost damage. This is a nitrogen-led feed, so the autumn cut-off matters more than it would with a weaker one. Feed in spring and summer, then stop, and you get the colour when you want it and a tougher lawn going into winter.
Why it's better than an ordinary lawn feed
Most liquid lawn products fall into three camps: fast synthetic feeds made from mineral salts, seaweed tonics that stimulate the grass but barely feed it, and slow bagged granules. This one sits in the gap between them. It genuinely feeds, like a synthetic, but it is plant-derived and low in salt, like the gentler options.
| This feed | Synthetic liquid feed | Seaweed tonic | Bagged organic granules | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where the nutrients come from | Recovered from plant material | Mineral salts; fossil-fuel nitrogen, mined P & K | Seaweed extract | Granules, often animal by-product |
| Actually feeds the grass (NPK)? | Yes, nitrogen-led 7-2-3 | Yes, often high nitrogen | No, a tonic rather than a feed | Yes, but slowly |
| How soon you see a difference | Days | Fastest | Subtle | Weeks |
| Salt load / scorch risk | Low | Higher, can scorch if misused | Very low | Low |
| Smell | Virtually none | Low | Seaweedy | Often strong (manure or fish) |
| Skips mining & fossil-fuel nitrogen | Yes | No | Mostly | Partly |
| No pesticides, kinder to wildlife | Yes | Yes (feed only) | Yes | Usually |
A fair, category-level comparison. Individual products vary, and the point is where each type sits, not any one brand.
Better for the environment, and here's why
The eco case is specific, not a slogan. It comes down to where the nutrients are made.
No fossil-fuel nitrogen
The nitrogen in most lawn feeds begins as ammonia, made by the Haber-Bosch process. Just over 70% of the world's ammonia is made by steam-reforming natural gas, with most of the rest from coal, and producing it accounts for around 2% of global final energy use and about 1.3% of carbon dioxide emissions from the energy system (IEA, 2021). Just under 70% of that ammonia goes into fertilisers. This feed's nitrogen is recovered from plant material instead, so none of that is burned to make it.
No mining
The potassium and phosphorus in conventional fertilisers are dug out of the ground as mined potash and phosphate rock. Here they are recovered from plant material that has already taken them up, keeping those nutrients in circulation rather than quarrying fresh ones.
Made from what would otherwise be waste
The raw material is residual plant matter, the leftovers that would otherwise be discarded. Turning that into a clean, usable feed is a small piece of a circular approach: nutrients recycled, not extracted or synthesised from scratch.
Honest limit: it still takes energy to process, bottle and deliver any feed, so this is a lower footprint, not a zero one. What it avoids is the mining and the fossil-fuel nitrogen.
The science: fast, but gentle
Recovering the nutrients from plant material and holding them in solution means the goodness has already been released from the solid matter. It arrives as soluble nitrogen rather than as material that soil organisms have to break down first, which is why a liquid like this acts faster than bagged organics.
Grass will use organic forms of nitrogen as readily as mineral ones. In one turfgrass trial, three amino acids applied to creeping bentgrass were absorbed about as well as urea, the synthetic standard, with uptake across all the nitrogen sources tested running between 31% and 56% within eight hours (Stiegler et al., 2013). That study measured uptake through the leaf on a golf green rather than through the roots of a home lawn, so read it as evidence that soluble organic nitrogen is genuinely usable by grass, not as a prediction of what any one lawn will do.
The gentleness comes down to salt. It is the salt in concentrated feeds, not the nitrogen itself, that scorches a lawn when feed goes on too heavily or onto dry grass. A plant-derived liquid at a sensible dilution carries far less salt, so the margin for error is wider and the soil life beneath is treated more kindly.
References
- Stiegler, J.C., Richardson, M.D., Karcher, D.E., Roberts, T.L. & Norman, R.J. (2013). Foliar absorption of various inorganic and organic nitrogen sources by creeping bentgrass. Crop Science, 53(3), 1148–1152. doi:10.2135/cropsci2012.08.0511
- Stiegler, J.C., Richardson, M.D. & Karcher, D.E. (2011). Foliar nitrogen uptake following urea application to putting green turfgrass species. Crop Science, 51(3), 1253–1260. doi:10.2135/cropsci2010.06.0377
- Heckman, J.R. & Murphy, J.A. Fertilizing the Home Lawn (Fact Sheet FS633). Rutgers NJAES Cooperative Extension. njaes.rutgers.edu/FS633/
- Royal Horticultural Society. Lawn care: spring and summer; Moss in lawns. rhs.org.uk
- International Energy Agency (2021). Ammonia Technology Roadmap: Towards More Sustainable Nitrogen Fertiliser Production. IEA, Paris.
- Erisman, J.W., Sutton, M.A., Galloway, J., Klimont, Z. & Winiwarter, W. (2008). How a century of ammonia synthesis changed the world. Nature Geoscience, 1, 636–639.
- United States Geological Survey. Mineral Commodity Summaries: Potash and Phosphate Rock. USGS.