Scotts vs. Sunday Lawn Care:Which Fall Fertilizer is Best?

A beautiful green lawn is a must have on many homeowner’s lists, but the reality is that it often takes a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and money to keep it healthy and beautiful.

As a team who spends a lot of time working on our lawns and loves finding the best new brands out there, we’re intrigued by the new DIY lawn care services that have popped up on the scene like Sunday. So we’ve done the digging (literally), and we’ve got the dirt on how a brand like Sunday holds up to one of the classic lawn care brands, Scotts. After a lot of research and testing, check out why we chose Sunday over Scotts as the best lawn care service on the market.

OUR TOP PICK

Sunday Lawn was created by brothers Coulter and Trent Lewis. As a recent home owner, Coulter found that most of the products available at home improvement stores for lawn care were filled with chemicals and pesticides that he didn’t want around the outdoor living spaces in his yard. So they decided to create a line of products better for your lawn, your family, your pets, and the environment. They partnered with Frank Rossi who has a PhD in Turf Science (aka, he knows everything there is to know about lawns) and started to create an alternative, effective, easy to use product that was pet-friendly, family-friendly and environment-friendly.According to the US Fish and Wildlife Foundation, traditional lawn care brands lay down 90,000,000 pounds of pesticides each year. They make your soil and grass dependent on these chemicals to survive. But these chemicals are pretty bad news. Of the 30 of the most common used pesticides, 12 have been linked to birth defects, 16 are potential carcinogens, and 29 are toxic to birds and bees. You wouldn’t want to put these pesticides on any space due to the harmful chemicals they let into the environment, let alone one your family and pets are interacting with every day.

Sunday’s lawn care pouches utilize natural ingredients to strengthen your lawn such as soy protein, iron, seaweed, molasses, Potassium, Phosphorus and more. Sunday Lawn has promised they will never use any of the following chemicals or ingredients: 2,4-D, Bifenthrin, Pendimethalin, Trifluralin, Glyphosate, MCPP, Imidacloprid, and Malathion.

One of the most important things about caring for your lawn is making sure you are utilizing the right products during each season. While planting season tends to happen in the spring, taking care of your lawn in the fall is critical to ensure the work you do to care for your lawn in the spring is actually effective. You don’t want to spend money and time updating your garden in the spring just to find out your soil wasn’t healthy enough for it to actually be effective.

Brands have started offering special fertilizers for the fall to protect your soil ahead of winter and get it ready for planting season in the spring. Scotts sells their Turf Builder Winterguard Fall Lawn fertilizer, which comes in a large bag that you can apply yourself to the soil. Sunday sells a bundle featuring a variety of fertilizers, weed whackers and products to apply your solutions to your lawn successfully. Both should be used in the fall to prepare your lawn for protection in the winter and growth in the spring, but are they really equal? Let’s take a deeper look.

Scotts

Scotts Turf Builder Winterguard Fall Lawn Fertilizer is the product commonly recommend you use for your lawn during the fall. It comes in a bag that you can buy online or find in most home improvement stores. Each bag covers about 5,000 square feet of lawn, so if you have a bigger lawn you’ll need to buy a few bags. While you can spread it on your own, they do recommend that you use a Scotts Spreader – a tool on wheels that you can use to spread fertilizer across your lawn.

Sunday

Sunday’s Fall Lawn Kit is filled with four products to restore your lawn from the hot summer, protect it during the winter, and help it grow in the spring:

Sunday’s Fall Fortify (42 ounces)

Sunday’s Grass Powerhouse (42 ounces)

Sunday’s Dandelion Doom Concentrate (5 ounce concentrate bottle)

1 herbicide concentrate pouch + wand sprayer

Sunday’s liquid fertilizers, Fall Fortify and Grass Powerhouse, give your grass a steady flow of slow-release nutrients so your lawn can recover from summer stress caused by heat and other environmental stressors, survive during even the deepest part of winter, and blossom in the spring. The Dandelion Doom Concentrate is a broadleaf weed control that helps you knock back weeds when they’re at their weakest. It uses just one active ingredient: iron.

Sunday’s Fall Lawn Kit doesn’t just stop at the physical products though – they also provide you with education and guidance on how to best care for your lawn and prep it in the fall for maximum growth in the spring. They tell you exactly when and how to apply your products, and they provide you with the exact amount that you need to apply for your lawn, unlike Scott’s Winterguard which just comes in a bag.

Both products can be easily applied to any type of lawn during wet or dry environments. However, Scotts does not speak about what is actually in their fertilizer, which is a bit worrying due to all the pesticides and chemicals that are in most modern day fertilizers. Sunday is clear that their products are free of ingredients that harm people, pets, and the environment, so it feels like the safer choice.

For Sunday’s Lawn Kit, you get all four products And even at that, $59 is not a lot compared to Scott’s bag which is about $24.99 per bag at most home improvement stores. While Sunday is more expensive than Scotts Turf Builder Winterguard Fall Lawn Food, you’re getting more products. Sunday’s products are also more pet-friendly, family-friendly, and environmentally friendly.

While it’s nice to be able to grab a bag of Scotts at a home improvement store, we love that Sunday ships your Fall Lawn Kit right to your door based on your schedule so you can check that extra errand off your to-do list. We also like how Sunday’s kit comes with multiple products and tools to help successfully apply the products to your lawn so there aren’t any extra costs like with Scotts where you have to buy their spreader separately, not to mention find a space to store it! 

OUR TOP PICK

While Scotts Turf Builder WinterGuard Fall Lawn Fertilizer is a good product, we recommend you purchase Sunday’s Fall Lawn Kit due to the number and variety of products that are included, the accessories that are included, the ease of ordering, and the pet-friendly and environmentally-friendly formula.