For one thing manure is not fertilizer. At best it is the raw material for
compost. Pile it all up, mix it every now, keep it moist and then, and when it smells as fresh as a forest floor after a spring rain, then it is ready to apply. If you want to apply it to a lawn use no more than 1/4 inch at a time. That amounts to 1 cubic yard per 1,000 square feet. The reason for not applying more is you can very easily smother the grass. Only the blades sticking up out of the compost will survive. The other reason why not to use more is that you are basically wasting your time and getting your hopes up. Compost is not a fertilizer either. It has very little protein or nitrogen in it. In fact you have to use it at the rate mentioned to get enough nitrogen to do anything. The weight of a cubic yard is 700 pounds so you are using it at a rate of 700 pounds per 1,000 square feet. The much better solution is to apply something with a lot of protein in it. Protein is made of amino acids containing nitrogen. When the protein is "rotted" by the fungi and bacteria in the soil, that protein is decomposed into primal elements and recombined into plant food by the microbes. This is how Mother Nature has done it for billions of years. When you apply something like alfalfa pellets, ground corn, soy bean meal, cottonseed meal, or other ground up grains, nuts, seeds, and beans, then you only have to apply at a rate of 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet.
Simply applying fertilizer to clover will not get rid of it, but it will improve the health of everything growing there. Whether your lawn can stomp out the clover is very iffy. I've been moderating several lawn forums for 10 years and am afraid to say that getting rid of clover organically is not as simple as fertilizing. The only non-chemical method I've heard of that works reliably is manual pulling. Even the run-of-the-mill chemical sprays don't work reliably. Ortho had to develop a stronger version of Weed-B-Gone, but I'm not going there.
On the other hand, many people have learned to live with a grass and clover mix. I know of a private golf course just north of Lake Erie that has a bentgrass/clover mix. They use no chemicals at all. No fertilizer either because the clover brings fertilizer to the soil. It is mowed only once a week on Friday in advance of the players showing up early Saturday. Greens are mowed to 1/4 inch and the fairways are mowed to 2 inches. Roughs are mowed to 3 inches. The greens are very firm but not rock solid like they were before when they used chemicals. All the players love the new course.
The problem with clover it it gets clumpy. If you seed the entire lawn with clover, it then looks very even and even plush.
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