A brown, crisp lawn in late summer looks alarming, but the grass under your feet is almost certainly still alive. The advice from the Royal Horticultural Society is blunt: resist the urge to water an established lawn, however parched it…
A mower that started first pull in June can refuse to fire after sitting through a dry summer, and stale petrol is usually the reason. Grass stops growing in a drought, the mower goes untouched for weeks, and the fuel…
A tired lawn that has come through a dry summer with hollows, bare patches and thin, uneven grass rarely needs digging up. The fastest way to rebuild the surface is top dressing: spreading a thin layer of sandy, free-draining soil…
A mower that drags through four or five pulls before it catches, splutters under load, or dies halfway across the lawn is often carrying one cheap, worn-out part: the spark plug. It sits on the side of the engine under…
A scatter of toadstools across the grass on a damp late-summer morning looks alarming, but it almost never means your lawn is sick. The caps you can see are the fruiting bodies of a fungus that has been living out…
A mower that will not start, bogs down in thick grass or blows dark smoke often has one cheap, overlooked fault behind it: a clogged air filter. It is the first thing a small-engine mechanic checks and the last thing…
A mower that sputters on a slope, loses power halfway across the grass, or dies mid-cut and refuses to restart is usually starving. Somewhere between the tank and the engine, the fuel is being choked off, and the cheapest, most…
The lawn you sow or turf this autumn will only ever be as good as the ground you prepare for it now. Grass seed dropped onto lumpy, weed-riddled soil germinates in ragged patches, roots into pockets of trapped air, and…
Yellow-brown dead patches spreading across a lawn in autumn, especially after a wet spell, often mean something is eating the roots from below. The usual culprit is the leatherjacket, the larva of the crane fly, and early autumn is the…
Reach for lawn feed at the end of summer and you might grab the wrong bag. The high-nitrogen fertiliser that drove thick green growth from spring onward is the last thing grass needs now. Autumn feeds are built the other…
