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 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…
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…
If you want a new lawn, early autumn is the window to aim for. From September to November the soil still holds summer warmth, rain becomes reliable again, and the weather sits between the extremes that stall germination. Sow now…
The weeks after peak summer give you the best chance of the year to reset a tired lawn. Hot spells, foot traffic and drought leave grass thin, patchy and full of dead material, and the mild damp spell of early…
A lawn that has filled with weeds is not really a weed problem. It is a grass problem wearing a disguise. Weeds move in where the turf has thinned, where the soil has hardened underfoot, where the mower has been…
Pinkish-red threads webbing through pale brown patches of grass are the clearest sign of red thread, one of the most common lawn diseases in cooler, damp climates. It shows up most in wet summers and through the heavy dews of…
A heat-stressed lawn does most of its recovering in the weeks after peak summer, not in spring. The grass you walked on, mowed short and watched fade through the hottest stretch is carrying drained roots and a thin, patchy surface.…
