When patches of lawn turn yellow then reddish-brown in the heat of summer and the turf thins out for no obvious reason, one likely cause is a fungal disease called anthracnose. It is easy to mistake for drought or a…
Stihl built its name on professional chainsaws, and the same engineering culture runs through its lawn mowers: heavy-duty build, strong batteries, and a price that sits above the supermarket brands. The question for most gardeners is not whether a Stihl…
If your lawn turns crisp and brown every summer no matter how much you water it, the variety of grass growing there may be the real problem. Some grasses are built to survive heat and drought, and some are not,…
If you push your mower up and down the garden in the same tramlines every week, you are slowly working against your own lawn. The grass starts to lean, the cut looks worse over time, and on heavier soil you…
Most lawns that turn brown in summer are not short of water as often as they are short of the right water, delivered the right way. The rule that does almost all the work is simple: give your lawn around…
The sprinkler you stand on the lawn decides three things: how evenly the water lands, how much of it is lost to wind and evaporation before it ever soaks in, and whether the far corners stay green while the middle…
Turn almost any mower on its side after a season of use and you will find a thick, hard crust of dried grass packed into the underside of the deck, often a centimetre or more deep around the blade and…
A good used mower is one of the best value buys in the whole garden. A quality machine that cost several hundred when new can change hands for less than a third of that a few years later, and with…
In a long dry spell, the bath, the shower tray and the washing-up bowl together throw out enough water to keep a lawn ticking over without touching the mains, and when a hosepipe restriction is in force, a watering can…
If a small cloud of pale moths lifts off the grass every time you walk across the lawn on a warm evening, the lawn is trying to tell you something. The moths themselves do no harm. Their offspring do. The…
