George Howson

If your lawn looks tired despite regular feeding and watering, the soil pH is the first thing to check, and the result will change every other decision you make for the rest of the year. Grass cannot absorb most fertiliser…

You go to bed with a flat lawn and wake up to a perfect circle of pale beige toadstools 40cm (16 inches) across, sitting in your front garden. Three days later they are gone. A week after that, a curving…

You wake up to find three or four neat conical hills of soil on your front lawn, with more arriving every morning, and the standard advice is either to call pest control or set lethal traps. There is a third…

If your lawn feels spongy underfoot when you walk across it in May, the problem is almost always thatch. A thin layer of dead and living plant material at the base of the sward is normal and even beneficial, but…

If your lawn is barely growing in May despite warm days and regular care, the problem is almost always one of three things: nitrogen has run out, the soil has stopped breathing, or your grass has started defending itself against…

If your lawn has suddenly grown a pale, wispy haze of stalks that defy your mower and bounce back up an hour after cutting, you are looking at seed heads. From mid to late May, almost every lawn made of…

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,…