A splash of petrol from the mower, a drip of engine oil, or an overturned handful of lawn feed leaves the same result: a dead, straw coloured patch within days. Move fast and you can save most of the grass.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
If your lawn sinks slightly underfoot in summer, like walking across a thin mattress, the cause sits just below the green blades. That soft, springy feeling points to thatch, a dense band of dead and living stems packed between the…
A brown summer lawn looks dead, but most of the time it is asleep. Cool season grasses shut down their leaves in heat and drought to protect the crown, the living heart of each plant, and they wait for cooler,…
A lawn that looked healthy on Friday and skeletal by Monday has almost always met one thing in late summer: armyworm caterpillars feeding in numbers. They move across turf in a loose front, stripping the green from grass blades as…
