If small craters of fine, loose soil are pushing up through your lawn in dry summer weather, ants have moved in beneath the grass. The instinct is to pour something on the nest and be rid of them, but that…
If pinkish red threads and ragged bleached patches are spreading across your grass during warm, damp weather, the culprit is almost certainly red thread. It is one of the most common lawn diseases of summer, and the single most useful…
If a patch of your lawn stays soft, feathery and green while the grass around it browns in a dry spell, you are almost certainly looking at yarrow. It is one of the few lawn weeds that spreads two ways…
A bumpy lawn is one of the most fixable problems in the garden, and you almost never need to dig it up and start again. The rule that decides your method is the depth of the unevenness. Anything shallower than…
If your lawn turns a deeper green after a night of rain than it ever does after an evening with the sprinkler, you are not imagining it. Rain feeds grass in ways tap water cannot match. It carries a small…
If the grass under your trees or along a shaded fence looks as though someone has dusted it with flour or talcum powder, you are almost certainly looking at powdery mildew. It is a fungal disease, caused by Blumeria graminis,…
A soil moisture meter costs less than a bag of feed, somewhere between 7 and 15 pounds (about 9 to 19 dollars) for the simple probes sold at most garden centres and online, and it removes the single biggest source…
The single change that does more for a summer lawn than any feed, gadget or seed is watering less often and more deeply. A lawn given ten minutes with the sprinkler every evening grows roots that sit in the top…
If you are tired of mowing, watering and feeding a patch of grass that browns off every summer, a chamomile or thyme lawn is worth considering. These scented, low-growing ground covers need no regular cutting, release a soft fragrance when…
Lift a paddling pool, a trampoline base or a heavy garden table after a few warm days and you find the same thing underneath: a pale, sickly yellow shape stamped into the grass. The good news is that in most…
