The number stamped on a petrol mower’s engine, 125cc, 160cc, 190cc, tells you the engine’s displacement, not how well it cuts. A bigger figure buys more torque for thick grass and slopes, but past a point it only burns more…
Long grass feels harmless, but a lawn left to grow through the hottest weeks of summer becomes a shelter for ticks and fleas and a source of the pollen that sets off hay fever. Cutting your grass to around 7.5cm…
Cutting width sets how many lengths of the lawn you walk. Nothing else on the spec sheet changes that number. Engine size, self-propelled drive, a bigger grass bag: all of those change how pleasant the laps feel. Only the deck…
Test the soil before you buy another bag of lawn feed. A lawn sitting at pH 5.0 can be fed four times a year and still look starved, as the nutrients you paid for stay chemically locked in the ground…
If irregular yellow-bronze patches have spread through your lawn this month, the fix is almost certainly a bag of nitrogen and a higher mower setting, not a hosepipe and not a fungicide. Anthracnose, caused by the fungus Colletotrichum cereale, is…
Take the cover off your petrol mower’s air filter before the next cut and hold the element up against a bright sky. If almost no light comes through the pleats, the engine has been running rich for hours and you…
Raise the mower to at least 6cm (about 2.5 inches), stop feeding, keep off the grass and let it turn brown. A well established lawn on a normal loam will sit out three to four weeks of complete drought in…
STIGA is one of those mower brands people buy on a shop assistant’s word without ever working out which model actually fits their garden. The range runs from a tidy little cordless machine for a courtyard lawn to ride-on tractors…
The moment a hot, dry spell puts your lawn into brown dormancy, a second lawn starts growing underneath it. Weeds that shrug off drought keep right on spreading while the grass sits idle, and by the time the rain returns…
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…
