If you take one action for your lawn this month, raise the cutting height. As the weather warms and rain becomes less reliable, the most useful thing you can do is stop cutting your grass short. A lawn held at…
When patches of lawn turn yellow then reddish-brown in the heat of summer and the turf thins out for no obvious reason, one likely cause is a fungal disease called anthracnose. It is easy to mistake for drought or a…
If your lawn turns crisp and brown every summer no matter how much you water it, the variety of grass growing there may be the real problem. Some grasses are built to survive heat and drought, and some are not,…
Most lawns that turn brown in summer are not short of water as often as they are short of the right water, delivered the right way. The rule that does almost all the work is simple: give your lawn around…
The sprinkler you stand on the lawn decides three things: how evenly the water lands, how much of it is lost to wind and evaporation before it ever soaks in, and whether the far corners stay green while the middle…
In a long dry spell, the bath, the shower tray and the washing-up bowl together throw out enough water to keep a lawn ticking over without touching the mains, and when a hosepipe restriction is in force, a watering can…
If a small cloud of pale moths lifts off the grass every time you walk across the lawn on a warm evening, the lawn is trying to tell you something. The moths themselves do no harm. Their offspring do. The…
When patches of lawn turn yellow and then straw-brown in the sunniest, driest parts of the garden in the middle of summer, almost everyone reaches for the hose. If the patches keep spreading no matter how much you water, the…
You can sow grass seed in the middle of summer and get a thick, even result, but you have to respect one hard truth first: the heat that drives established grass to grow fast is the same heat that kills…
Scattered straw-coloured spots about the size of a coin, dotted across an otherwise green lawn in warm summer weather, are almost always dollar spot. It is one of the most common lawn diseases of the season, and the fix surprises…
