Grass Clippings

Seasonal water tariffs threatens lawns

Householders are set to pay more for water during the summer following the introduction of a controversial tariff. Southern Water customers in Sussex, Kent and Hampshire will pay the higher rate this summer whenever they take a shower or water the garden.

Water watchdog OFWAT confirmed at least three other suppliers were also looking at introducing seasonal tariffs as a way to encourage people to use less water.

The new tariff, which will be in place between June and September, has been introduced because of a looming water shortages. After the winter we have just had?

'When I get older, I shall be buying purple ..... turf'

The Lawn Company teamed up with Q Lawns the Norfolk based turf grower last year to complete the online sale and supply of quality lawn turf and top soil from their web based lawn shop. We can announce that Q Lawns have started the new decade with a new set of brochures, a new-look website, a revised pricing policy and a brand new logo.

“It was time for a change” says Sales and Marketing Manager Chris Carr “The new look reflects a new and improved way of doing things at Q Lawns, we’re not going to let the knock-on effects of recession get us down, we’re going to pull our socks up, sing a happy song and offer our customers better value for money to help them through these difficult times.

Lawn Advice, News and Tips into your inbox

It is always important to keep in touch. Across the main portal web domain www.lawn.co.uk we have always given our readers the opportunity to enter their email address in return for timely and topical lawn care advice, tips and news back into their inbox.

We have managed these email address lists in different ways whether a visitor to www.lawn.co.uk simply enquired about our services or used our online estimate auto quoter service to ascertain the potential costs of a lawn treatment or renovation or purchased from our online lawn shop. It was getting a bit messy so we took the task on and enlisted the services of Mail Chimp to help us pull it all together.

Mail Chimp is a web-based platform for managing email newsletters and email lists. It will now allow us to maintain one list where subscribers can manage their wish to belong on line with ease.

Over the coming months if you would like to receive lawn advice, news and tips straight into your preferred email address inbox, you can enter your details at the top left of this site.

Advice - Grass Clippings Lawn Advice Blog
Service - The Lawn Company
Supply - The Lawn Shop
Lawn Treatment Estimate - Lawn Estimate Online
Mail Chimp Newsletter Management

A great lawn can help sell your house

We can all visualise a nice green lawn with even width dark and light mowing strips. We can equally marvel at the visual appearance of a premiership football pitch on the television. As the science and technology of turf culture has progressed since 1966, premiership football pitches still look equally good at the end of a gruelling 90 minutes of play compared to the Wembley pitch back then which was bare of most of its grass cover and the players covered in mud.

A lawn has many benefits too, some of which are not always pre considered when a landscape project is being planned.

Calendar of Lawn Care

Our daily lives are often led by our watches and diaries.

Your lawns' growth and development throughout the year will often be weather led but that should not stop you planning your lawn care year by following a simple calendar of lawn care. At least if you have planned a particular lawn treatment or mechanical operation in one month and do not manage to complete it when you had planned, at least you can perform it in the following weeks or month should the prevailing weather be suitable and relevant for the treatment or task.

The Lawn Shop - solving your lawn treatment conundrums

Since the increase in Internet shopping over the past two decades, there is now probably nothing that you cannot order online.

You can now order lawn care products from the comfort of your fireside armchair. This expands the range of products available to you to view at your fingertips from the comfort of your armchair rather than a trip to the floor to ceiling stacked shelves of the lawn care section of your local garden centre or DIY outlet and that is if they have a dedicated and good lawn care section!

The problem with such stores is like the pallets of baked beans stacked at your local supermarket - just too much choice!

Not out of the woods yet

We are all waiting for that weekend when you can reconnect with the garden and review the winter damage of the lawn. We have been close several times this month already but just as we seem to get to a point where we receive some warmish watery winter sunshine, less cold wind chill and some plus temperatures, the weather seems to quickly knock us back again with a very minus feels like minus 7 wind chill.

Seeing red... or was it pink?

Just to prove that the other man's grass isn't always greener, lawns throughout the country are turning pink reports the Daily Mail this week. Yes, you read correctly - pink.

The harsh winter has led to the worst outbreak of snow mould for more than 20 years.

The fungal disease exists on many lawns without usually causing any problems. But when under a blanket of snow, it starts to thrive. Patches of grass rapidly die, then when the snow melts the characteristic candy-floss pink or grey blotches come to light.

Lawn Hand Rollers - love or hate them

We are often asked about rolling your lawn 'to make the surface even'. It would be very easy to compile a blog entry on rolling your lawn and the use of rollers on a lawn - simply don't. That would make the technical lawn advice post a little too easy and you know that I never get away that easy so here is some justification of my ‘don't bother’ comment.

If you are a professional turf manager responsible for creating sports pitches and natural turf playing surfaces, rolling the turf after the winter frosts is important. A hockey pitch may be rolled to improve the speed of the ball over the surface and the same applies to other fine turf areas such as golf and bowls greens and croquet lawns. Any rolling operations that these areas receive are done to carefully consolidate the surface but not to the detrimental effect of air and water percolation and drainage and definitely not to over compact the soil beneath the grass.

Making holes in the subject of lawn aeration

In a wet autumn and through the winter months, failure to carry out a programme of lawn aeration can lead to an entirely different problem. This is when surface sealing can often occur, due to the compacting effect of trampling feet and heavy maintenance machinery.

Under these conditions, water is prevented from percolating; it will remain on the surface, restricting gaseous exchange and lead to moss or the build up of fibrous growth. If steps are not taken to relieve the compaction, a fibrous matt develops, restricting the amount of air, moisture and nutrients available to the grasses and creating ideal conditions for diseases to thrive.

There is still much to be learnt about aeration and a lot of what is known is hard to prove. What can be said is that most experts agree that opening up the turf surface with machinery of one type or another is beneficial.

Which? evaluate lawn treatment products

Which? focus on consumer issues and ensuring you have the information to make the right choices - whether that's by reviewing products or providing independent advice you can trust. Their testing team tackled the many amateur lawn treatment products.

Lawn advice - getting it right first time

An individual with extensive skill and or knowledge in a particular field is said to be an expert. An expert might be of interest or value to journalist needing information, comment or an interview for a news story or feature as this gets the journalist right to the spot they need to be for their story, saving them a lot of leg work, time and money. The internet has made a researcher’s job so much easier over the last two decades.

There are a lot of people in all professions who claim to be an 'expert' and the lawn care and lawn treatment industry is no exception to this rule.

Pest & Disease Diagnosis by Text and Email

Visitors to Grass Clippings Lawn Advice Blog will alread be familiar of the assistance they get from our Technical Team to their lawn problems. It is common for us to receive pictures from readers via email seeking diagnosis and advice to their lawn problems, including lawn disease and lawn pests.

Now one of the major amateur horticultural suppliers Westland Horticulture, has launched a text and email-based pest and disease diagnosis.