Adding Iron to your lawn
Yes, adding iron to your lawn will generally make it “greener” and often give it that blue/green look. The nice thing about iron is that it will green up your lawn without driving huge amounts of new growth. For best results liquid Iron really needs to applied via foliar spray or it can get locked up in the soil.
The Iron Product Doc Uses
This is the 16 oz size for about $10
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This product comes in a 32 oz or a one gallon container.
Doc buys the gallons and uses 1 cup per 5000 sq feet.
About $38 per gallon
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← Super Juice Spray Lawn Fertilizer is the first ALL-IN-ONE, complete, balanced, lawn fertilizer that comes in a dry mix. Simply add to water and using a hose end sprayer apply to your lawn. One bag of Super Juice will treat ONE ACRE* or 43,560 ft of lawn at the full concentration rate. Super Juice can be applied in a 14-2-4 ratio for a full acre of lawn, or most use it at half strength in a 7-1-2 ratio, and it treats two full acres. NO waste products and Bio waste. Packaged in a resealable foil-lined bag with an easy open tear strip which saves time and effort during mixing and loading
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Some good quotes from turf experts and EDU.
The green-up connection with iron use is fairly direct in that iron is required for the synthesis of chlorophyll the green photosynthetic pigment in grasses. While iron is not a component of the chlorophyll molecule, it is required as a cofactor in three reactions leading to chlorophyll synthesis.
In short, with no iron there is no chlorophyll. Consequently, the most obvious symptom expressed by an iron deficient plant is chlorotic (pale green to almost white) leaves.
Because iron is not readily remobilized or retranslocated within the plant, it does not move from older to younger leaves when iron becomes wanting. Thus, the youngest leaves become chlorotic, while older leaves remain green. This is the classic symptom of iron deficiency
Iron Uptake
As demonstrated, iron is required for many metabolic functions in plants, including turf grasses. There is a problem, however, for plants to acquire iron from the soil. Most soils contain abundant iron, but most of it is immobilized as insoluble salts and soil structural components (primary minerals, clays, etc.).
In a well aerated soil, virtually all iron is in the oxidized ferric form which readily combines with phosphate, sulfate, and hydroxide radicals to produce salts that are essentially insoluble. Because of this, the concentration of absorbable free iron cations (Fe3+ or Fe2+) in most soils is often less than one part per trillion far below that needed for adequate plant growth.
Turf Manager PDF – Great Read
http://archive.lib.msu.edu/tic/tgtre/article/1999feb1a.pdf
http://www.grounds-mag.com/mag/grounds_maintenance_iron_nutrition_improves/