Most lawn owners bag their clippings out of habit, not because the lawn needs it. The bag fills up, you stop to empty it, walk it to the compost heap or the green waste bin, come back, and repeat the…
You roll the petrol mower out of the shed on the first warm Saturday in May, prime the bulb three times, brace your foot on the deck and pull the cord. Nothing. You pull again, harder. Still nothing. By the…
There are two kinds of dog owners with lawns. The first kind has accepted that their grass is a write-off and stopped caring. The second kind keeps trying to figure out why the same patches keep turning yellow despite watering,…
The single visual change that lifts a tidy lawn to a professional looking lawn is a clean edge. You can mow perfectly straight stripes, feed regularly, water deeply, and the garden will still look unfinished if the lawn edge crumbles…
Spring rain followed by a sudden warm spell is one of the most common situations every gardener has to deal with in May. The grass shoots up four or five centimetres in a few days, you look out of the…
Walk through any allotment, golf club workshop or older suburban garage and there is a good chance you will see a Honda lawn mower from the 1990s or early 2000s, still cutting grass every Saturday. The grip is faded, the…
If patches of your lawn have turned a sickly yellow this month and the grass lifts away like a loose rug when you tug it, you almost certainly have grubs feeding on the roots underneath. The two culprits in late…
If you are still mowing your lawn once a week in May, you are already falling behind the grass. In late spring the combination of warming soil, regular rainfall and longer daylight hours pushes most cool-season grasses into their fastest…
A dull mower blade is the single most common reason a lawn looks ragged in summer. It rips the tips of each grass plant instead of slicing them, leaving a frayed, whitish-grey edge that browns within 48 hours and lets…
The first warm, dry weeks of May is usually when anthills appear. One Saturday the lawn is flat, the next morning there are half a dozen small mounds of fine soil between the daisies, and within ten days you have…
