The green and yellow stripes that appear across a lawn a week after feeding almost never come from the fertiliser itself. They come from the spreader, and specifically from how it was set up and walked. Get the calibration, the…
Reaching for the weedkiller on a hot, sunny afternoon feels like the obvious time to deal with the dandelions and clover taking over. It is also the time most likely to leave you with scorched grass and weeds that shrug…
Most lawn diseases creep. Pythium blight sprints. In the wrong weather it can turn healthy grass into greasy, collapsed streaks in a single night, and a large area can be lost in 24 to 48 hours. The conditions it needs…
If a patch of your lawn has turned straw brown in early summer and watering does nothing to revive it, billbugs are worth ruling out before you blame the weather. These small weevils lay eggs inside grass stems, and the…
The single most neglected job in lawn care is cleaning the underside of the mower, and it quietly ruins both the machine and the cut. Grass clippings pack against the deck, dry into a hard crust, and choke the airflow…
Small, round, straw coloured patches scattered across your lawn in summer, each about the size of a coin and rarely bigger than 5 to 8cm (2 to 3 inches), point to a fungal disease called dollar spot. Look closely in…
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…
