Question
Hi,
Should I feed the garden sections of my yard with sugar (and corn gluten meal or alfalfa meal) or only the lawn sections?
Also, you say that you water after applying the sugar. Can I spread the sugar just before or while it is raining instead of watering it in?

Answer
Hi Kate;
The porpose of the sugar, and the only use it has, is to nourish the beneficial microbes and all that organic bio-organisms you want working in the soil.
so you use it everywhere.
The corn Gluten meal is used ( by those who use it) as a natural weed and feed, so it can be used everywhere too.
All the organics are to be used wherever there is soil.
It feeds the natural bio-organisms.
Thinks of it as just feeding the worms.LOl
The "worms" of all different sorts, do the work, you just feed them.
When we are about to have a rain, and I am wanting to put sugar down, I do put it and let the rain water it in, unless it is such a hard rain that it is going to just dump so much watet that all of iot is fgoing to run off before any of it has a chance to soak into the soil. Thankfully it doesn't rain that hard that often, but it sometimes does.
I put sugar down a couple of weeks ago, and it rained a slow easy rain almost all day. I did truly give thanks for that, because it soaked every bit og the sugat in, and my grass really shows it now. It is green as a Leprechaun's hat.
I am all about all the "free" water I can get!
I have even gone out and thrown down sugar and/or alfalfa meal when it was starting to rain.
I get some strange startes from some of the neighbors, but they have known me long enough to not besurprised what time of the day or night, or what weather conditions I might be out working in my yard. LOL
When I was raising my children, and working outside the home too, and doing all the Girl Scouts etc, the only times I could get a chance to work on my yard, watering, feeding etc, was in the middle of the night.
If the sugar just gets wet enough to disolve, it is going to stay on the ground. If you don't get it watered in well for a few days or a week, when water does fall on the ground, it is going to wash some of the sugar in.
I just water deeply all the time, in fact, if it is needing water, and it rains, but not enough to soak at least 6 incjhes into the soil, I will go out and water some more.
The purpose of the deep watering is to get the roots to grow deep into the soil.
A deep root system hlps your grass and plants survive quite a bit of weather abuse.
When you don't get a chance to water for several days past when you would normally give it a good watering, even in the summer, with a deep root syatem, you will still have moisture down where the roots are, when the top 3 or 4 inches of soil ar dry, so it will survive more drought conditions, more cold, and will not have roots coming up to the surface to get water, and dieing, and causing thatch.
Charlotte