A sharp mower blade cuts grass; a blunt one tears it. You can restore a dull rotary blade to a clean edge at home in about twenty minutes with a £10 (about $13) mill file or an angle grinder, and…
Brown patch can turn a healthy lawn into rings of dead grass in the time it takes for one warm, humid night to pass. If you are seeing roughly circular brown areas, sometimes with a darker grey ring around the…
If patches of your lawn lift away like a loose carpet, or birds and animals have started tearing at the turf overnight, the cause is almost certainly chafer grubs feeding on the roots below. The fastest reliable fix is a…
Every time you bag up your grass clippings and wheel them to the compost heap, you are throwing away the cheapest lawn feed you will ever own. Leaving finely chopped clippings on the lawn, a practice turf scientists call grasscycling,…
You mow the lawn, it looks neat, and within a day a haze of pale, wispy stalks has risen back above the surface as if you never cut it. The mower seems to flatten them and miss them every time.…
The dark and light bands that turn an ordinary lawn into a striped sports field look like the work of two different shades of grass, but they are nothing of the sort. Every blade is exactly the same colour. The…
If small craters of fine, loose soil are pushing up through your lawn in dry summer weather, ants have moved in beneath the grass. The instinct is to pour something on the nest and be rid of them, but that…
If pinkish red threads and ragged bleached patches are spreading across your grass during warm, damp weather, the culprit is almost certainly red thread. It is one of the most common lawn diseases of summer, and the single most useful…
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…
