How To Determine If Costco's Popular Fertilizers Are Right For Your Lawn

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

Costco is a popular store for folks looking to buy in bulk, or if you want a deal on sturdy furniture. It also sells practical things for your lawn, like fertilizer. Though you have to pay an annual fee to be a member and go shopping, it can be worth it, depending on how much you're planning on visiting. However, before you invest in a giant bag and possibly a membership, you need to make sure Costco sells something that works for you and your lawn. You may even want to think twice before using fertilizer on your ground cover plants, for example, as it can easily burn or damage them.

The first step in determining if Costco's popular fertilizers are right for your lawn is to figure out what your yard needs. Each type of grass and climate requires something a little different. For a general guideline, you can look around for suggestions for your grass type and climate. However, if you want a much more specific idea of what you need, you can also get a soil test, which will tell you the minerals you are lacking, particularly nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium (NPK). Fertilizing with the wrong NPK ratio, or applying it at the incorrect time, are some of the ways you are secretly ruining your lawn. Costco's main fertilizer brand, Scotts, tends to add no phosphorus except in its starter fertilizers (because excess amounts can leach into area waterways, causing algal blooms). But they may have more nitrogen than you need, leading to damage. If you're short on this mineral (which is common), though, Scotts could be an ideal option. 

Scotts has several options to choose from on Costco's online store, so you have a good chance to find one that is what you're looking for. Depending on your grass, the best time of year to fertilize your lawn is in either the late spring or the fall. Sometimes your lawn also just needs a bit of a booster. No matter the situation, Scotts has an option for you. 

Costco offers both the brand's standard Max lawn food and its highly-rated Max Southern lawn food. Both work as a core fertilizer, depending where you live. Scotts has a few specialty options in the Max lineup available at Costco as well. This includes the Crabgrass Preventer with lawn food, Weed & Feed, and Southern Weed & Feed.

The basic Max lawn food works well for most lawns that don't require special care. KY82, a reviewer on Costco, said it worked as intended: "Great Scotts fertilizer for the summer and at 100 degree [temperatures] in Central California, I followed the directions and this worked as promised without any burning." It's a fairly affordable product as well, coming in at under $60 for about 35 pounds. A bag covers about 14,000 square feet, or nearly a third of an acre. On Amazon, Scotts Green Max lawn food costs $64.99 for just over 33 pounds, and for 10,000 square feet (just under a quarter-acre) of application. This equates to roughly $1.91 per pound versus about $1.71 per pound at Costco at press time. While not a huge difference, if you're looking to use this product to improve your lawn regularly, the price can add up. And sometimes, every penny counts.

While Scotts is one of the cheapest options per square foot of fertilizer on Costco's website, the store carry several other brands. For example, Geocharged is an organic and natural fertilizer. It has a more balanced NPK, at a ratio of 1.2 to 3.3 to 1.8, which may be ideal for some gardens, or lawns that don't do well with an overabundance of nitrogen. gardenmom on Costco's website rated it five stars, stating, "I have used this product for years, and I have saw[sic] more produce out of garden, and more abundant flowers in my beds. Love that it is safe to handle and good for the planet!"

In short, while there might not be anything unique about the fertilizers at Costco versus home improvement stores or Amazon, it offers several brands and kinds to choose from, one of which is likely to work well for your lawn. If you have a Costco membership, or are looking to get one anyway, then buying fertilizer there is a great way to get the mix your lawn needs for less than you might find elsewhere (the same 10-pound bag of Geocharged runs about $3 more at Home Depot). It might also be worth it if you use a lot of fertilizer throughout the year, like if you have a big yard. However, if you just need a bag on occasion, and you don't think you'd benefit in other ways from shopping at Costco, then finding a different brand, or one of Scott's similar lines from another store might be the better option.

To fully understand the benefits of Costco's fertilizers and whether or not they could be beneficial to readers, Outdoor Guide took a deep dive into the products Costco covered, as well as what makes a fertilizer useful. In the end, because every lawn's needs are different, it boils down to cost, convenience, and the variety Costco offers.

To make sure the products this store sold were worth it, reviews on Costco's website as well as blogs and other platforms like Reddit were parsed as well. This allowed us to fully understand how most people felt about this product, and if it was worth using. In addition to reading positive and negative reviews, we looked at the reviews in detail to see if those who liked their purchase had any negatives and vice versa.