A self-propelled mower that has stopped pulling itself is one of the most common late-season complaints, and it almost always strikes now, when thick, damp growth puts the drive under the heaviest load of the year. Most people reach straight…
If pink or rust-tinged patches have appeared on your lawn over the past few weeks, the culprit is almost certainly red thread, a fungal disease that turns up on many lawns in late summer and early autumn. The good news…
Your petrol mower runs fine for ten minutes, then loses power, bogs down and cuts out. You yank the cord and nothing happens. Twenty minutes later, once it has cooled, it fires up first pull and repeats the whole cycle.…
A summer of paddling pools, garden chairs, football and hot dry spells leaves most lawns with a few bare or worn patches by late August. The good news is that the next few weeks are the best window all year…
The battery is the single most expensive part of a cordless mower, and how you charge and store it decides whether it lasts five years or fades in two. As the cutting season winds down and the mower heads for…
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…
