The dark and light bands that turn an ordinary lawn into a striped sports field look like the work of two different shades of grass, but they are nothing of the sort. Every blade is exactly the same colour. The…
If small craters of fine, loose soil are pushing up through your lawn in dry summer weather, ants have moved in beneath the grass. The instinct is to pour something on the nest and be rid of them, but that…
If pinkish red threads and ragged bleached patches are spreading across your grass during warm, damp weather, the culprit is almost certainly red thread. It is one of the most common lawn diseases of summer, and the single most useful…
Almost every mower has a lever marked with numbers, usually one to five or one to seven, and almost everyone assumes a higher number means a taller cut. That part is true, but the numbers themselves tell you nothing useful…
If a patch of your lawn stays soft, feathery and green while the grass around it browns in a dry spell, you are almost certainly looking at yarrow. It is one of the few lawn weeds that spreads two ways…
A bumpy lawn is one of the most fixable problems in the garden, and you almost never need to dig it up and start again. The rule that decides your method is the depth of the unevenness. Anything shallower than…
The single biggest decision when you buy a walk-behind mower is not the brand or the engine. It is whether the back of the machine rolls on two wheels or on one full-width roller. A rear roller gives you the…
If your lawn turns a deeper green after a night of rain than it ever does after an evening with the sprinkler, you are not imagining it. Rain feeds grass in ways tap water cannot match. It carries a small…
If your lawn shows two faint parallel tracks after every mow, or worse, soft grooves you can feel through your shoes, the mower wheels are pressing into ground that is too soft to carry their weight. Summer is the worst…
If the grass under your trees or along a shaded fence looks as though someone has dusted it with flour or talcum powder, you are almost certainly looking at powdery mildew. It is a fungal disease, caused by Blumeria graminis,…
