A tired, patchy lawn at the end of summer usually points to one hidden culprit sitting right at the base of the grass: thatch. Early autumn, with its mild air and damp soil, is the window to rake it out…
A broken lawn edge pulls the eye faster than almost anything else in a garden. The grass in the middle can be thick and green, but a crumbling border or a scalloped bite out of the edge makes the whole…
If pink or rust-tinged patches have appeared on your lawn over the past few weeks, the culprit is almost certainly red thread, a fungal disease that turns up on many lawns in late summer and early autumn. The good news…
A summer of paddling pools, garden chairs, football and hot dry spells leaves most lawns with a few bare or worn patches by late August. The good news is that the next few weeks are the best window all year…
A brown, crisp lawn in late summer looks alarming, but the grass under your feet is almost certainly still alive. The advice from the Royal Horticultural Society is blunt: resist the urge to water an established lawn, however parched it…
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…
