Have you considered natural grasses for your lawn?
(contributed by Peter Schubert; email: schuby@mindspring.com)
As to nitrogen from fertilizing lawns, you are missing the boat. If you own a home (or a factory, or an office, or a university, or any property), simply do not fertilize your grass! Instead, ask yourself why you have grass in the first place. Is it only because you must if you are to have an attractive yard? Is it because you love to mow the lawn every week or so? The lawns we grow in the piedmont, for the most part, consist of a monoculture of only 1 grass species, either an alien (not native to temperate North America) warm season grass (zoysia, bermuda, St. Augustine, centipede, etc.) or an alien cool season grass (fescue or blue grass). Except where these species have been introduced and have escaped to grow wild (displacing early successional native grass species but ultimately climax forest), there are no natural equivalents of our lawns in the piedmont, period! Our lawns are artificial landscapes, created to resemble the pastures and greenswards of Europe and England, from where our dominant land ethic originated. As such, they are inherently unsustainable. If you do not agree, consider how many natural plant communities require man to intervene by applying regular fertilizing and liming and irrigation to maintain them in a perpetual state of green growth. How many natural plant communities exist only because man applies powdered limestone or dolomite twice annually to temporarily alter the soil pH?
So, why have a turfgrass lawn at all? If you really want a greensward, how about planting native grasses, of which virtually all are the warm season type. Mow the grass occasionally if you want to keep it shorter (nature uses ungulates) but that's it! No need to fertilize or lime or irrigate. If your soil is infertile (likely because of unsustainable farming and land clearing practices in the past that lead to the erosion of the topsoil or the consumption of all organic matter without replacement), amend the soil before planting, and never worry about it again.