A good used mower is one of the best value buys in the whole garden. A quality machine that cost several hundred when new can change hands for less than a third of that a few years later, and with…
In a long dry spell, the bath, the shower tray and the washing-up bowl together throw out enough water to keep a lawn ticking over without touching the mains, and when a hosepipe restriction is in force, a watering can…
If a small cloud of pale moths lifts off the grass every time you walk across the lawn on a warm evening, the lawn is trying to tell you something. The moths themselves do no harm. Their offspring do. The…
A mulching blade is not simply a sharper version of the blade your mower came with. It is a different shape designed to do a different job. Where a standard blade flings clippings out of the deck and into a…
When patches of lawn turn yellow and then straw-brown in the sunniest, driest parts of the garden in the middle of summer, almost everyone reaches for the hose. If the patches keep spreading no matter how much you water, the…
You can sow grass seed in the middle of summer and get a thick, even result, but you have to respect one hard truth first: the heat that drives established grass to grow fast is the same heat that kills…
Scattered straw-coloured spots about the size of a coin, dotted across an otherwise green lawn in warm summer weather, are almost always dollar spot. It is one of the most common lawn diseases of the season, and the fix surprises…
For a home garden, the John Deere machine you actually want is a ride-on from the 100 Series or the X300 Select Series, not the commercial walk-behind mowers that share the same green and yellow badge. Those walk-behinds, with their…
A petrol mower that will not start after months in the shed almost always has one of five faults, and you can fix most of them in half an hour with cheap parts. Work through them in order of likelihood:…
The stripes you admire on sports pitches and show gardens are not cut at different heights and they are not a different grass. They are an optical illusion created by light bouncing off grass blades bent in alternating directions. That…
