People tend to walk at different speeds. When you are pushing a spreader, this difference in walking speed can cause problems.

Some high-quality plastic spreaders have precision equivalent to the better homeowner metal spreaders. There is a tremendous difference in performance among brands and models.

A good lawn spreader is a precision tool and should be treated accordingly. Your lawn spreader doesn’t need a great deal of time-consuming maintenance, but a few simple steps can preserve the life and precision of your spreader.

Walk-behind lawn spreaders are designed to be pushed, not pulled. The delivery rate from drop spreaders and the pattern from rotary spreaders are distorted if a spreader is pulled backward.

Drop spreaders are best suited to small lawns where you want uniform patterns or have many obstacles to trim around. Rotary spreaders are generally best for large, open areas.

When you buy a bag of fertilizer or granular pesticide to spread on your lawn, it will usually have a label on the back of the bag with settings for several common fertilizer spreaders. Do you know where those settings come from, how they were developed or how reliable they are?

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.

Some rotary spreaders can deliver a reasonably uniform distribution pattern with some products, but not with others, and some homeowner rotary spreaders don’t deliver a good pattern with any product.

If you want to apply granular products correctly, you will need to use the correct spreader pattern setting, swath width, and rate setting. This article will tell you how to achieve this.

Some spreader experts and some spreader and granular material operating instructions advise you to go over your lawn twice when spreading fertilizer or granular products, with the two trips over the lawn made at right angles to each other. Don’t do it!