Grass & Lawn Care

Lawncare can take as much or (nearly) as little time as you like, but as with many things a little effort will pay handsome dividends and you can have a pleasing green base to your garden.

The sensible minimum is to rake the lawn with a spring rake once a year, ideally early Spring. Next go across the lawn pushing a garden fork in, 3 inches is plenty deep enough, give the fork a wiggle to enlarge the holes. Do this 4 times per metre. When you have done a couple of rows, get a barrow of fine compost or sandy soil, or best of all both mixed together, then using a shovel or spade flick it across the lawn where the fork holes are, if there are any hollows or dips in the lawn spread more of the mix. Use a brush to sweep the mix into the holes and hollows. Continue until you have covered the whole lawn. All this will give your grass a bit of fresh food and keep the roots aerated.

Now as long as you mow the grass weekly – best results will come from a cylinder mower – and water the lawn if it is in danger of drying out you should have a lawn to be proud of.

If your lawn has a lot of weeds, this can be dealt with by many proprietary compounds from your garden centre, these are generically known as “weed and feed”. The only rider I would add to this is that if you have large docks, thistles or dandilions you may be better digging these out (an old half inch chisel is a good tool for this) as it will take quite a few applications of weed and feed to finally kill them off.

Edging is obviously important to keep things looking good, and a hard (brick, paver etc) mowing strip although hard work to put down will quickly pay you back with less time spent edging.

The final thing to note is that if you want stripes on your lawn you must get a mower with a roller, it is the different directions in which the grass is laid down that gives the stripe effect.