You wake up to find three or four neat conical hills of soil on your front lawn, with more arriving every morning, and the standard advice is either to call pest control or set lethal traps. There is a third…
If your lawn is barely growing in May despite warm days and regular care, the problem is almost always one of three things: nitrogen has run out, the soil has stopped breathing, or your grass has started defending itself against…
If your lawn feels spongy underfoot when you walk across it in May, the problem is almost always thatch. A thin layer of dead and living plant material at the base of the sward is normal and even beneficial, but…
If your lawn has suddenly grown a pale, wispy haze of stalks that defy your mower and bounce back up an hour after cutting, you are looking at seed heads. From mid to late May, almost every lawn made of…
There are two kinds of dog owners with lawns. The first kind has accepted that their grass is a write-off and stopped caring. The second kind keeps trying to figure out why the same patches keep turning yellow despite watering,…
The single visual change that lifts a tidy lawn to a professional looking lawn is a clean edge. You can mow perfectly straight stripes, feed regularly, water deeply, and the garden will still look unfinished if the lawn edge crumbles…
Spring rain followed by a sudden warm spell is one of the most common situations every gardener has to deal with in May. The grass shoots up four or five centimetres in a few days, you look out of the…
If patches of your lawn have turned a sickly yellow this month and the grass lifts away like a loose rug when you tug it, you almost certainly have grubs feeding on the roots underneath. The two culprits in late…
If you are still mowing your lawn once a week in May, you are already falling behind the grass. In late spring the combination of warming soil, regular rainfall and longer daylight hours pushes most cool-season grasses into their fastest…
The first warm, dry weeks of May is usually when anthills appear. One Saturday the lawn is flat, the next morning there are half a dozen small mounds of fine soil between the daisies, and within ten days you have…
