If pale, star-shaped clumps of coarse grass are flattening out across your lawn this month, you are almost certainly looking at crabgrass. The single most useful thing to know is that timing decides everything: a young plant with one or…
You can keep a lawn largely weed-free without spreading anything that forces you to fence off the garden from children and pets for days. The safest approach is also the most effective long term: pull or spot-treat the weeds you…
The first cut of a lawn grown from seed is the moment most new lawns are either made or ruined. Cut too early, too low, or with a blunt blade on soft ground, and you can rip seedlings clean out…
The single most useful thing you can do with a season of grass clippings is stop throwing them in the bin and start turning them into compost. A summer lawn the size of two parking bays produces enough clippings to…
Every bag of lawn feed carries three numbers, something like 12-4-8 or 20-2-6, and they tell you exactly what is inside and what the product will do to your grass. They are the percentage by mass of nitrogen, phosphorus and…
The lawn you come home to after two weeks away is decided in the hour before you lock the door, not while you are gone. Most holiday lawn disasters are self-inflicted: a final mow cut too short, a heavy feed…
If a strip of your lawn has gone thin, flat and bare after a summer of barbecues, paddling pools and a constant stream of feet to the back gate, the fix is not simply more seed. Worn grass is almost…
If you only ever buy one type of lawn feed for the summer, make it a slow-release one. The difference between slow-release and quick-release fertiliser is not marketing, it is chemistry, and in hot weather that chemistry decides whether your…
That bare brown line worn across your lawn, the one everyone takes as a shortcut to the gate, the shed or the trampoline, is not a grass problem you can fix with seed alone. It is a soil problem that…
If moss is creeping across a shaded corner while the rest of your lawn turns dry and pale, the weather is not the real culprit. Moss does not kill grass. It moves into the space that thin, struggling grass has…
