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Information about selecting and calibrating commonly available lawn spreaders.
Rotary spreaders offer the advantages of wide, fast coverage and forgiving patterns, but they are not well suited to working along turf edges. Some spreaders offer a pattern cut-off mechanism to address this problem.
Most turf fertilizers contain controlled-release nitrogen fertilizer. There are two types of controlled-release fertilizer and one type can be damaged by your spreader.
To obtain the best results from your granular fertilizers and pesticides, you have to apply them at the correct rate. One easy step you can take to help assure that your spreader delivers the correct rate of material is to calibrate your spreader.
The more you learn about lawn spreaders, the more you realize how complicated they really are. The LSU AgCenter has published a bulletin that summarizes 24 years of research on spreaders.
Most professional applicators use rotary spreaders. Rotary spreaders are not only faster than drop spreaders, but are more forgiving of small errors in swath width.
Rotary broadcast spreaders offer many advantages for turf professionals. There are also some disadvantages including pattern skewing and the need to develop pattern settings for each product to center the pattern. Pendulum-action spreaders overcome those problems.
