Almost every mower has a lever marked with numbers, usually one to five or one to seven, and almost everyone assumes a higher number means a taller cut. That part is true, but the numbers themselves tell you nothing useful…
If a patch of your lawn stays soft, feathery and green while the grass around it browns in a dry spell, you are almost certainly looking at yarrow. It is one of the few lawn weeds that spreads two ways…
A bumpy lawn is one of the most fixable problems in the garden, and you almost never need to dig it up and start again. The rule that decides your method is the depth of the unevenness. Anything shallower than…
The single biggest decision when you buy a walk-behind mower is not the brand or the engine. It is whether the back of the machine rolls on two wheels or on one full-width roller. A rear roller gives you the…
If your lawn turns a deeper green after a night of rain than it ever does after an evening with the sprinkler, you are not imagining it. Rain feeds grass in ways tap water cannot match. It carries a small…
If your lawn shows two faint parallel tracks after every mow, or worse, soft grooves you can feel through your shoes, the mower wheels are pressing into ground that is too soft to carry their weight. Summer is the worst…
If the grass under your trees or along a shaded fence looks as though someone has dusted it with flour or talcum powder, you are almost certainly looking at powdery mildew. It is a fungal disease, caused by Blumeria graminis,…
A soil moisture meter costs less than a bag of feed, somewhere between 7 and 15 pounds (about 9 to 19 dollars) for the simple probes sold at most garden centres and online, and it removes the single biggest source…
If your mower started on the first or second pull last autumn and now refuses to fire at all, the fuel sitting in the tank is the most likely reason, not the engine. Modern standard unleaded contains up to 10…
The single change that does more for a summer lawn than any feed, gadget or seed is watering less often and more deeply. A lawn given ten minutes with the sprinkler every evening grows roots that sit in the top…
