How can you help to improve your lawn?

Some tips for maintaining a healthy lawn; combine lawn³ and some good practices in your garden and bring your lawn to life!

1. Don’t cut the lawn too short. This is a major source of lawn problems for many people who believe that is what they do on golf courses and so that is what you should do at home. In fact golf courses use growth inhibitors to restrict the growth of the grass, and the grass is able to reach a ‘maturing’ height where it can prosper much shorter than normal. Cutting the grass short at home has several disadvantages:
   
   
   • It encourages moss
   • It provides an ideal environment for the transmission of weeds
   • It prevents the grass reaching a ‘maturing’ height – it’s just the same as cutting a flower off a third the way up the stem – you wouldn’t expect it to thrive, would you?
   • It provides no shade to the roots in very hot weather
   • It increases the amount of watering required.
   
   Grass should be cut to a length between one to one and a half inches long, and preferably only 1/3 of the length each time. Longer grass provides a greater surface area for photosynthesis and therefore healthier grass. Leaving the grass a little longer also leaves the ‘crown’ of the grass intact (where the grass leaf grows from). Longer grass grows more slowly and therefore you can reduce the amount of mowing required, which in turn allows the grass to fully recover between mowings. All in all, longer grass gives a better lawn.
2. Don’t leave the cuttings on the lawn. Eventually it will biodegrade and put nutrients back into the lawn, but it will take several weeks and during that time several cuttings will form a thick sub-surface thatch that will begin to rot – providing the perfect damp and dark environment that moss thrives in! Leaving cuttings on your lawn also means your house is always full of grass!
3. Make sure the blades on the mower are sharp. Sounds trivial? Imagine pruning a rose tree with a choice of razor sharp secateurs or sawing the stems off with a rusty old hacksaw – which do you think will give a clean cut with least trauma to the plant? Exactly, and it’s the same with grass.
4. Don’t water infrequently in hot weather. If you are going to water the lawn in the heat of summer make sure you have a regular and frequent watering pattern. Watching the grass turn yellow in very hot weather (a natural reaction) over a period of 2 to 3 weeks and then deciding to give it a good sprinkling is probably the worst thing you can do. The chances are you will only give a surface watering which will not penetrate the soil to any great extent. As a result the roots all turn upward to get to the water, which is fine until the next hot and sunny day when the roots all die in the heat. It is one of the fastest and most effective ways of destroying a lawn. If you are going to water, water well and water often so the roots still manage to find water deep in the soil. Otherwise just leave it – unless there are extenuating circumstances most lawns will come back to their original condition when the rain returns.