It Can Burn Your Lawn
This review is for Scotts Turf Builder Plus 2 Weed Control/Fertilizer. I'm giving this product only one star because of the following prominent statement on the front of the package for this product and some others that they sell: "Won't Burn Lawn. Guaranteed." When my gardener applied this product to my lawn 6 months ago using a Scotts spreader, it caused a large number of brown patches of grass in the lawn, and these patches did not return to green for more than a month. Thinking that this must have been the gardener's fault somehow, and naively believing the claim that it would not burn my lawn, I decided to apply the product again last week, this time doing it myself and taking scrupulous care to follow all the directions on the package. I even placed plastic stakes in the lawn to mark where the Scotts AccuGreen 3000 spreader's wheels had been to try to avoid overlap. One week later, I again have a large number of brown patches in a lawn that was nearly perfect before I applied the product. These patches are primarily in areas where a small amount of overlap must have occurred in spite of my best efforts to avoid it (my lawn is quite curvy and gets narrow at some spots).
I called the Scotts customer line and spoke to two people who were very polite and sympathetic. They were not able to explain why the company places this prominent "guarantee" on its packages, but obviously they do it to increase their sales. I politely refused their offer of a refund, since it required work on my part for very little money. In my opinion, if they claim that the product is "guaranteed" not to burn, they should come to my house and replace my lawn for me, and obviously they have no intention of doing that. They did explain to me that the burn resulted from too much fertilizer, not from the weed control component. One suggestion they had was that next time I might consider reducing the setting on my spreader from 5 1/4 to 4 1/2 or so, or that I could try a hand-held spreader that would not tend to drop a bunch of product in one spot when I hit a bump or turned a corner (but I would have to be very careful near shrubs, unless I chose a product without weed killer). Another idea would be to use only a product without weed killer, since the weed killer component requires one to keep the lawn dry for at least 24 hours (the weeds can be killed by spraying at another time). If I did that, I could water the lawn immediately after application to reduce the risk of burning.
In my opinion, Scotts should remove the statement that their product is guaranteed not to burn a lawn, since this "guarantee" essentially only means that, when the product does burn your lawn, they will refund the money you spent buying the product, if you can find your receipt etc.