A self propelled mower drives its own wheels so you only steer, while a push mower moves only as hard as you shove it. The self propelled version costs more to buy and more to repair, so the honest answer…
A ring of darker, faster growing grass appearing in your lawn through summer, sometimes with toadstools around its edge and a band of dead grass inside, is a fairy ring. It is caused by a fungus living in the soil,…
Most lawns die of thirst in summer because their owners water little and often, which is the opposite of what grass needs. The target is simple: roughly 25mm (one inch) of water a week during dry spells, delivered in one…
A strimmer that snaps its line every thirty seconds turns a ten-minute edging job into a frustrating afternoon of refeeding the spool. The cause is almost never a faulty machine. In most cases the line is the wrong thickness for…
While ordinary grass lawns turn straw-brown in a long dry summer, a lawn with clover woven through it stays green with no watering at all. Clover roots reach deeper than grass roots, the plant pulls its own nitrogen from the…
A robot mower trims a little grass every day and mulches the clippings back into the lawn, so the grass never grows long enough to need collecting. For the right garden it removes mowing from the to-do list entirely. The…
The quickest way to lose a green lawn in a dry spell is to keep cutting it as short as you did in spring. Raise the mower by one notch before the hot weather arrives and the same lawn holds…
When sections of your lawn lift away like a loose rug in July and August, the trouble sits two to three centimetres (about one inch) below the surface. Fat white C-shaped grubs or leathery grey-brown larvae have been chewing the…
When a lawn turns brown in a summer drought, the instinct is to drag out the sprinkler and pour water on it. In most established lawns that is the wrong move. A brown summer lawn is usually not dying, it…
If you have a bank, a terrace, or a steeply sloping lawn, the safest machine is almost always a hover mower, because its deck floats on a cushion of air and you sweep it sideways across the slope instead of…
