Can You Put Too Much Lime On Your Lawn? (Can Too Much Lime Cause Grass To Turn Yellow)

It is likely that at some point in your adult life, you have experienced lawn envy. Some people are able to achieve healthy, pure green, beautiful lawns, and they make it look effortless in the process.

You might find yourself wondering how they are able to achieve this, and what exactly is their secret. 

In a lot of cases, the secret to a beautiful green lawn is lime. If you lack experience looking after a lawn, then this might seem like a strange treatment.

But, it is actually very common. In fact, using lime is one of the best ways to achieve both health and growth in your grass. So, if you want to improve your lawn, then lime really is the way forward. 

But, there is one major risk that comes with treating your lawn with lime, and that is the risk of over-treatment. In this guide, we’ll be taking a look at why you can put too much lime on your lawn, and what happens if you do. So, to find out more, keep on reading. 

Why do you add Lime to your Lawn?

You might be wondering why anybody would want to add lime to their lawn. As we have said, this can seem like a very strange thing to do.

When you think about treating your lawn, you probably think of pesticides and herbicides, one of the last things that you think about is fruit. So, let’s take a look at the logic behind this. 

The reason behind adding lime to your lawn lies in chemistry. You might not be aware, but your lawn will naturally have a high amount of acid in it.

This is because acid is soaked into the soil that houses your lawn. This high amount of acid has the ability to damage your lawn, and prevent it from growing healthily. But, lime can reverse this. 

Lime is an alkali, and so by adding it to your lawn, you can reduce the amount of acid in the soil by neutralizing it.

When the soil is neutralized, it will no longer be high in acid, and this will allow grass and other plants to grow naturally and healthily within it. This is why you would add lime to your lawn. 

Can you put too much Lime on your Lawn?

As we have said, yes, you can put too much lime on your lawn. This is the main risk factor that comes with using this type of treatment on your grass and soil.

When you are calculating the amount of lime to add to your lawn, this has to be a very delicate process. This is because of the scientific reasoning behind adding lime to your lawn. 

Science is very delicate, which is why you have to be very careful when adding lime to your lawn. If your lawn isn’t that high in acid, then adding too much lime might over-neutralize your lawn.

Can You Put Too Much Lime On Your Lawn? (Can Too Much Lime Cause Grass To Turn Yellow)

If this happens, then your lawn will not be ‘neutral’ as you were aiming to achieve, instead it will be high in alkaline. 

Should you add too much lime to your lawn, then you can cause something known as iron deficiency.

In humans, iron deficiency can make you very unwell, and the same thing happens to your lawn. If your lawn has an iron deficiency, then it will begin to look unhealthy.

The primary sign of unhealthiness being your lawn turning yellow, rather than green. As well as this, too much lime can cause your lawn to contain too much calcium, which will just make it even more unhealthy. 

How to Fix Too Much Lime on your Lawn

So, adding too much lime to your lawn clearly isn’t ideal. The whole point of doing this is to improve the health of your lawn, so it can be intimidating that this act which is supposed to protect your lawn can actually damage it.

But, there is no need to panic if you do add too much lime to your lawn because this is actually reversible. So, let’s take a look at what to do if you think you have added too much lime to your lawn. 

First things first, you need to do a pH test on your lawn to determine if you have actually added too much lime to your lawn. There are other things that could cause damage to your lawn, so you shouldn’t just assume that the problems are caused by too much lime.

There are a variety of soil testing kits that you can buy to do this, so simply take a sample of your soil and use these kits to test it. 

Once you have determined that there is too much lime in your soil, you have three options. The first is to simply wait for your lawn to balance its own chemical pH out, this will usually take around 2-3 months.

The second requires you to apply horticulture sulfur to the lawn. This will reverse the overload of alkaline, but it does carry a risk as you could add too much to your lawn, and find yourself back with a lawn that contains too much acid. 

The best way to fix this problem is to apply a layer of topsoil to your lawn. This will feed your lawn and naturally reduce the pH level back to a neutral amount.

This will also help improve the general health of your lawn at the same time, which is why we think it is the best option.

But, no matter which method you choose, there is no need to worry if you add too much lime to your lawn because it is reversible. 

Summary 

In short, yes, you can put too much lime on your lawn. This is because lime is an alkaline that is used to balance the high acidity of your lawn. If you add too much lime, then you can cause your lawn to become alkaline rather than neutral.

But, if you do this, don’t worry because it is reversible. You can find out how to do this by checking out the guide above.