A family lawn has a hard life. It takes football boots, paddling pools, dog claws, garden furniture, and the constant traffic of people crossing the same line to the back gate. The grass seed that makes a fine ornamental lawn…
If you have stood in a garden centre looking at a row of Mountfield mowers wondering why one costs £185 and another nearly twice that, the short answer is power source, propulsion, and lawn size. Mountfield has built its name…
When a hot, dry spell is forecast, most people do one of two things with the mower, and both are usually a mistake. Some carry on cutting at the same low setting they used in spring, scalping the grass just…
Every dog owner with a back garden knows the look. Round yellow circles, sometimes ringed with darker green growth, scattered across the lawn where the dog goes. Three months of careful feeding and the patches keep coming. Caging off the…
Walk onto any professional sports turf operation, country estate or municipal grounds team and one mower brand turns up again and again. Toro. Founded in 1914 in Minnesota to build tractor engines, the company quietly became the global standard for…
If your shoes pick up an orange-yellow dust every time you walk across the lawn, the grass is telling you something specific. That powder is fungal spores, not pollen, and it is the visible signature of lawn rust (genus Puccinia),…
A clean oil change is the single piece of mower maintenance that decides whether your engine survives summer in good condition or starts smoking in mid-July. Petrol mower engines run hot, dirty and at constant high revs, and the oil…
The first fortnight of June is the moment most lawns either pull ahead for summer or quietly start losing condition. Soil temperature has settled above 12 degrees C (54 degrees F), the grass is in its highest growth gear of…
The first proper heatwave of June arrives and the sprinklers come out across the country. A week later, half the lawns that ran sprinklers for two hours every evening are still going yellow in patches while a small number of…
Most people choose a mower by price, brand, or whether the neighbour has one they like the look of. The single specification that decides how long you spend mowing every weekend is something nobody mentions in the showroom: cutting deck…
