Grass Clippings - Home of the British Lawn

How to renovate a lawn

I am often asked by client and friends alike how to renovate a lawn. Normally this question comes about after I have been around their garden and they get a bit scared that I might look at their lawn! A brief meeting with a set of friends yesterday evening was typical of such a request. After all, they are keen enough to tackle the task themselves but are lacking the know how on what to do when and also at what time of year too.

To keep it simple, there are a few rules to follow - more of a flow chart of tasks. This process can be performed at any time during the lawn growing season but allow at least an additional 6 weeks to complete the growing process at the back end of the year before the autumn frosts and leaves fall from the trees as the frosts will slow the germination process and the leaves will smother the new grasses!

Tips on controlling moss in lawns

Moss control and then Moss removal in lawns is a practice normally performed in the spring lawn care months. If the grass plants activity has thinned or weakened over the past 12 months, especially after the harsh winter, now is the time to start Moss control and eradication and some mechanical operations just ahead of over seeding the lawn to turn the tide on the moss and re populate with existing or new grasses.

Dog urine burns in lawns

All lawn owners with dogs have been there. Their green lawns polka dotted with brown pee marks from their beloved pooch. There are the many old wive's tales of adding tomato juice into their dogs' food or water bowl to reduce the impact of their dog urine burn mark on the lawn.

The Team at Grass Clippings have been busy trialing a new product that actually works! They have also given some consideration to repairing the damage afterwards, one that is 'soil less' and very effective.

Applying lawn fertiliser

We have all seen it - stripy lawns where a lawn fertiliser has been incorrectly applied. A bit like the picture of the lawn shown here. It is important to learn how to fertilise a lawn so that you encourage even and consistent growth and colour and plant health. The problem arises when you have the job of trying to match in the light and dark bands of grass without over application of a lawn fertiliser.

Preparing a lawn for spring

We have just come through the coldest winter for 30 years the Meteorological Office has announced today! Spring is officially one month late this year. The majority of the country is still currently having frosts at night and this frost is now getting into the ground, making it hard to a depth. It will take a few warm days to get the frost out of the ground but looking on the bright side at least in the South East it has stopped raining! There is still some snow in the North and Scotland.

You should never walk on a frosty lawn otherwise your footprints will snap off the tops of the frozen grass blades leaving brown grass blade tips once the frost has cleared from the lawn like footprints in the sand on the beach.

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.

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.