Grass talks to you in colour, and learning to read it saves both money and guesswork. A lawn drifting blue-grey is thirsty. One turning pale yellow from the ground up is short of nitrogen. Yellow that shows first on the…
When a heatwave sends your lawn brown and dormant, the grass stops growing and the mower goes quiet for weeks. That idle stretch does more harm to a petrol engine than most people realise, and the damage happens out of…
If your lawn sinks slightly underfoot in summer, like walking across a thin mattress, the cause sits just below the green blades. That soft, springy feeling points to thatch, a dense band of dead and living stems packed between the…
If your cut has looked ragged lately and the grass tips brown a day after mowing, dry summer conditions have almost certainly taken the edge off your blade sooner than the calendar says they should. A blade that sailed through…
A brown summer lawn looks dead, but most of the time it is asleep. Cool season grasses shut down their leaves in heat and drought to protect the crown, the living heart of each plant, and they wait for cooler,…
The spring loaded bar you hold against the handle of a walk behind mower is the single most important safety part on the machine. Let it go and the blade stops, on most mowers within three seconds. That bar has…
A lawn that looked healthy on Friday and skeletal by Monday has almost always met one thing in late summer: armyworm caterpillars feeding in numbers. They move across turf in a loose front, stripping the green from grass blades as…
If your lawn takes a summer of football, dog runs and paddling pools and still knits back together within a fortnight, the grass under your feet is almost certainly perennial ryegrass. It is the workhorse of hard wearing lawns, and…
The patch of lawn under the big tree at the side of the garden is the single most frustrating piece of turf in any garden. It thins. It moss-fills. It stays sparse no matter how much you seed, feed, or…
A ride-on mower is one of the most satisfying garden investments you will ever make, and one of the easiest to get wrong. The market spans from around £1,500/$1,890 for a small lawn tractor to over £10,000/$12,600 for a zero-turn…
