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So the lawn is looking a bit tired comming into spring, some weeds, some moss, some brown patches, the dandilions will be back in force soon, etc.
Other that throwing some grass seeds around and hoping for the best, is there a lazy mans choice to get a better grass lawn?
Yea, easiest way is rotavate it 6 months ago, leave polythene on top over winter to kill everything then roll the soil firmly and re-seed in Spring. The loose earth is key, ideally sieve it finely aswell and remove all the dead moss etc.
Some effort required @mattyfez 😉 but it’s a pretty simple annual routine
1. Strengthen lawn and kill moss with iron sulphate now
2. Scarify well in a couple of weeks - you have got to do this and it will look awful at first. Pull up any course, clumped, light coloured looking weed grass (if you can be arsed aerate as well, it’s generally held as one of the best thing to do with a lawn)
3. Overseed with a good quality general purpose seed eg from A1 Lawns and walk or roll in to make sure seed is in contact with soil. Some will top dress but I don’t bother.
4. Feed, water and cut once seed is established (cut to about 60mm, if you want shorter do gradually over a number of weeks).
5. Feed regularly every couple of months over the Summer and water in
6. Enjoy amazing lawn
Nice, thanks 🙂
bookmarking for later.
Good tips @devbrix I'm guessing you know your stuff... I have a question...
My lawn is in terrible condition, very mossy and patchy after finishing my extension work, it's also very lumpy and bumpy.
I intended to follow your tips up there to help clean up the lawn, but I'd also like to try and flatten it out.
I was thinking to just get a couple of tonnes of topsoil delevered and spread around ro fill in the holes and maybe give a 50mm coverage over the existing grass area, then reseed it probably in the hope I get a flatter green grass for the summer.
Is this likely to work?
Or should I should dig it up and re turf it instead?
I live in Hertfordshire and have very clay based soil
Thanks
Rotational grazing my chickens is working well in my garden, move the pen and house every few days and they are tearing the moss out of the lawn. Far less effort than scarifying. Let them little dinosaurs do it for me
Looking on screwfix website they sell a ground tiller for £50. I may buy that and give that a go, if I was to use the tiller and break up the existing lumpy and uneven turf, spread it about and then mixing some topsoil and re seed, that should work I'm thinking?
That screwfix tiller is fine, but don't expect it to magically sink down in to and turn over hard compacted ground.
Reading more into this, looks like I should remove the existing turf then use the tiller.
It's getting very involved now!
1. Strengthen lawn and kill moss with iron sulphate now
2. Scarify well in a couple of weeks – you have got to do this and it will look awful at first. Pull up any course, clumped, light coloured looking weed grass (if you can be arsed aerate as well, it’s generally held as one of the best thing to do with a lawn)
3. Overseed with a good quality general purpose seed eg from A1 Lawns and walk or roll in to make sure seed is in contact with soil. Some will top dress but I don’t bother.
4. Feed, water and cut once seed is established (cut to about 60mm, if you want shorter do gradually over a number of weeks).
5. Feed regularly every couple of months over the Summer and water in
6. Enjoy amazing lawn
And if you have a female dog don't let them pee on it.
Overdose of nitrogen kills the grass.☹
Prompted by this thread I scarified our lawn this morning and then over seeded it - been a really damp winter so the moss had really taken over during winter.
Thank you for this:
1. Strengthen lawn and kill moss with iron sulphate now
2. Scarify well in a couple of weeks – you have got to do this and it will look awful at first. Pull up any course, clumped, light coloured looking weed grass (if you can be arsed aerate as well, it’s generally held as one of the best thing to do with a lawn)
3. Overseed with a good quality general purpose seed eg from A1 Lawns and walk or roll in to make sure seed is in contact with soil. Some will top dress but I don’t bother.
4. Feed, water and cut once seed is established (cut to about 60mm, if you want shorter do gradually over a number of weeks).
5. Feed regularly every couple of months over the Summer and water in
6. Enjoy amazing lawn
Was looking at my lawn this weekend thinking what do I need to do!
On the scarify point, whats the preferred tool for this? I need to buy something, I can see manual tools, electric or petrol options!
Feed, water and cut once seed is established
What do you recommend for feed?
Even my moss is dying.
On the scarify point, whats the preferred tool for this? I need to buy something, I can see manual tools, electric or petrol options!
We have a cheap Qualcast electric Scarifier from Homebase, does the job fine. They are really viscous machines, you have to keep it moving and it if digs in, it will dig a hole in your lawn in about 2 seconds! Does make it look terrible after you've used it, but creates space for the grass to grow back into, I guess ours was about £60, they last for ever as you only use it once or twice a year.
Our has a nice foam handle which the local mice took a liking to and completely stripped off the metal one winter. Not sure if they ate it or use it for bedding....
I guess ours was about £60, they last for ever as you only use it once or twice a year.
Screwfix shows a £60 electric option, I'll pick it up and give it a whirl!
We have a cheap Qualcast electric Scarifier from Homebase, does the job fine. They are really viscous machines, you have to keep it moving and it if digs in, it will dig a hole in your lawn in about 2 seconds! Does make it look terrible after you’ve used it, but creates space for the grass to grow back into, I guess ours was about £60, they last for ever as you only use it once or twice a year.
+1, got ours off facebook marketplace.
Iron sulphate, you'll need a spreader and a few bags of dry sand to dilute it with to do it evenly. Doing it by hand just results in stripes of burnt grass and moss. Diluting it in a watering can also work, just be very careful around any concrete or wood as it will stain it.
The first year I took almost a wheelie bin of thatch and moss out one autumn, and it looked like the Somme for months. Then repeated the process 18 months later once it had a chance to recover. And will be doing it again this spring, but only on the lower lawn which is far more clay than topsoil.
Hollow tines are supposed to work, but being clay once you've made the first hole in our garden you're just left with an awkward to handle fork.
Just got a new house, have a big lawn which has a lot of moss in it. The step by step plan above sounds appealing....
The main bit i want to do is about 1500sqm. Any ideas on equipment and amount of stuff I'll need? Does the Iron Sulphate spray on - back pack sprayer at the weekend type job?
Let the weeds grow! Good for biodiversity
I've got 3000sqm that will get that opporunity!
Got to get the lower half sorted as a lawn.
I've grown to enjoy my mossy lawn, it barely ever needs mowing and looks green which is all a lawn really needs to do
https://www.lawnsmith.co.uk/green-up-soluble-ferrous-sulphate?pv=20 <- this stuff at 400g/100sqm?
Yep, I just bought the chemical in bulk as it was cheaper then made my own by diluting it with dry sand so it was easier to spread.
You'll need some sort of spreader though. I just found doing it by hand resulted in stripes of burnt grass and stripes of moss. I've got one that looks like the one below, it's rubbish at distributing small amounts, hence I tend to fill a bucket with half a bag of sand, mix in the required amount of moss killer then spread the mixture onto the lawn.
And this is our scarifier, it's £120, but we got it 2nd hand for about £30 I think as for most people it's a one off job (or a couple of years to get it good then leave it). The bag on the back is useless if the lawn is overun, bin it, bungee the flap up and wear a face shield! I think I must have done 5 or 6 passes, raking the moss off manually into rubble sacks and wheelie bins before it stopped pulling more out.
It comes with a set of 'blades' too, the idea of those is they divide the grass plants so you get a much more even and thicker lawn afterward so the moss doesn't get a chance to establish itself again.
And if you have a female dog don’t let them pee on it.
Overdose of nitrogen kills the grass.☹
Or a male one, it's just that females squat to pee so it all goes in one place, so the effect is concentrated. Males cock generally cock their leg against a hedge or something, so it's scattered about and not as bad.
Unless, like ours, you regularly cock your leg against the tree that's in the middle of the lawn...
Been in our house 2 years. Lawn slowly gone downhill.
Is that my mistake for using my lawn mower on a mulching setting?
It’s a right pain collecting all the clippings !
Been in our house 2 years. Lawn slowly gone downhill.
Pretty normal, a traditional lawn is not a natural state so you have to work to maintain it - or just let it go wild.
Is that my mistake for using my lawn mower on a mulching setting?
It works if you keep it short and cut it regularly so the clippings are tiny as they'll rot quickly and add nutrients back to the soil. If you're cutting it every couple of weeks and the clippings build up as thatch then that will kill the lawn, and the longer it takes to break down the more nutrients the bacteria are taking out of the lawn to do that. Same reason you have to compost everything else, not just dump the waste straight back in the flower bed.
Yep, I just bought the chemical in bulk as it was cheaper then made my own by diluting it with dry sand so it was easier to spread.
That site suggests you spray it rather than sprinkle (?) it using a spreader. The stuff is water soluble, I was going to get the amount to spray in a given area into the back pack spreader, mark out said area and then just go back and forth until i've emptied the amount for the given area (say 100sqm).
And if you have a female dog don’t let them pee on it.
Overdose of nitrogen kills the grass.
Definitely this! After spending a lot of money completely renovating our garden including 30 tonnes of top soil and buying top quality roll turf we found to our dismay after a few months of an immaculate lawn a lot of dead patches started appearing where our two dogs like to pee! There are some good tips on youtube how to re-seed these areas which have been fairly successful though.
I bought the Screwfix scarifier last week and it does an amazing job. It’s got blades and also another attachment with hooks for raking.
Quite incredible how much it pulls up, the grass catcher is too small, so I tie open the rear flap and then rake it all up. I then managed to get a feed and weed down before this rain, so will see how that works out.
Yep, just use a cheap electric scarifier with the back tied up as @Rockape63 does. I’ve a fair amount of lawn so use a leaf blower to blow the stuff which comes up in to a massive pile. I have also ‘verticut’ the grass every two months in the Summer using the scarifier at a higher setting which helps get rid of weed grasses by ripping them up. Use a sprayer for the iron sulphate but still overdose at times and get black bits (no-ones perfect lol). I don’t cut it too short or the weeds get going and if it’s dry my grass dies quickly as the soil is quite sandy.
Here the result from last weekend after 12 months of this routine, not bad for beginning of March. The lawn was sh1t before, covered in weeds, moss, weed grass and I had a massive leatherjacket problem (Daddy Longlegs grubs) which completely killed off about 30m2 of lawn last Spring which is now sorted. There was a great big bald patch in the middle of this picture last Spring. That’s when I started to research what to do to get a better lawn.
Another thread to follow...
How much iron sulphate would I be needing for 450m² of mossy lawn?
Any problems with doing the iron suplhate when it's going to / has been raining? (plan for the weekend...) - clay soil if it matters.
No mention of frozen sausages yet...
Very disappointing.
Ran the old Black & Decker lawn rake over the back lawn, and removed half a builder's sack of moss and thatch. Now looking a bit better, but we don't put chemicals on that one as the Guinea pig may not approve.
Front lawn is 4-5 times the size and in a much worse state. Got some 4 in 1 feed and weed down last week ahead of the rain and the moss is already blackening off. Will rake that out in a couple of weeks time and then look to reseed it.
Is a spreader the best way to reseed? Mix it with compost or sand to help it spread maybe?
Have also taken delivery of a hollow time aerator fork. That's going to take some effort and timing between the clay soil being "soggy bog" and "effectively kiln fired terracotta"
Been using one of these things @MoreCashThanDash
Have also had guineapigs and chickens in the garden for many years but no longer have them so understand not using chemicals as I didn’t either. Apart from the iron sulphate now I’m only using organic feeds - seaweed based.
Ignore me, link now showing
As all the lawn experts are here, the soil in our lawn appears compacted. When it rains it is immediately waterlogged and the grass appears to have trouble growing in places. What's the easiest way to get it in a better state?
Got some 4 in 1 feed and weed down last week ahead of the rain and the moss is already blackening off. Will rake that out in a couple of weeks time and then look to reseed it.
the 4in1 stuff I use say you need to wait 6-8 weeks after applying before re-seeding. Might be different for yours, but worth checking (I used it 2 weeks ago for this reason)
@devbrix - thanks, I'll get a tub ordered. When we moved in 6 years ago the lawn was really nice. Hopefully I can get it back to how it was...
1. Strengthen lawn and kill moss with iron sulphate now
2. Scarify well in a couple of weeks – you have got to do this and it will look awful at first. Pull up any course, clumped, light coloured looking weed grass (if you can be arsed aerate as well, it’s generally held as one of the best thing to do with a lawn)
3. Overseed with a good quality general purpose seed eg from A1 Lawns and walk or roll in to make sure seed is in contact with soil. Some will top dress but I don’t bother.
4. Feed, water and cut once seed is established (cut to about 60mm, if you want shorter do gradually over a number of weeks).
5. Feed regularly every couple of months over the Summer and water in
6. Enjoy amazing lawn
Picked up an electric scarifier over the weekend, surprised at how much thatch and moss it pulled out of the lawn, was gearing up to go buy some seed and overseed but this weeks low temps means I'll delay a week.
One thing I noticed whilst out mowing and scarifying in the sun, my lawn is infested with tiny 5pence size spiders, quite nippy and run away when you walk towards them, but very creepy. The mowing and scarifying seemed to have culled a good number of them, where do they live and how can I get rid of them?
how can I get rid of them?
why on earth would you do that? They're outside eating the nasties.
Leave them be, they'll be gone in a few weeks.
My lawn garden is sloping, so the lawn is terraced. I need to raise one corner by about 6 inches where the subsoil has compacted. What is my best option?
The lawn is also quite clumpy and uneven. Will scarifying fix this?
Nobody mentioned top dressing with soil? We have scarified mercilessly, added a tonne and a half of top soil (150 sqm, second time in five years) and then some decent seed over the existing grass. That's basically what Green Fingers will do. And it works fine. Got to put in some nutrients and the fresh topsoil will help with the seed.
Full disclosure: my gardener is responsible for one of the most famous lawns in the country. And mine.
i've looked into top dressing and there seems to be debate as to whether it adds any value or not. I only read into it after I'd already bought a tonne of sharp sand and 600L of compost (which I read is roughly the mix you're meant to use), so i'll be doing it anyway once it warms up a bit
And if you have a female dog don’t let them pee on it.
Overdose of nitrogen kills the grass
Indeed. Just spent an hour or so earlier today cutting turf from the front garden to replace dead brown patches in the back garden. Next step filling, leveling, and seeding the donor patch out the front.
I'm away from home for a few days break at CyB. Loads of snow here today so I was hoping that the weather would be better at home in Carmarthenshire. Then I get a call from Son #2 to ask me if he needs to water the reseeded lawn if it has snow on it. Buggeration, the seed was just starting to germinate. Fingers crossed 🤞 that it will be OK.
I am going to try to level up sections of lawn. There is a strip where there used to be a path but the turf isn't great quality.
Rather than lift the turf and levelling it, can I just fill the depression with top-soil and seed it? It's about 30mm deep, 60cm wide and 5 metres long
I did that on my old garden path, it looked out of place for a couple of years (different colour grass) but blended in after that.
Thread bump.
Neigbour had some of that 4 in 1 stuff so I put that down last week and the moss is browning now, best to leave it another week I guess before I rake out the dead stuff?
I'll buy a few bags of soil to dress the uneven areas before applyong grass seed.
Further up the thread it's mentioned to feed the lawn afer a while, any partcular feed?
Cheers.
Oh, should I be doing a mix of sharp sand and soil to dress the lawn?
the 4 in 1 I have says leave for 8-12 weeks before re-seeding, so I'd check on that..
Will do cheers.