2015 Lawn thread

[moles]

Im leaving my worm casts as well but yes they are everywhere and about 20mm high!. Going to cut mine on sunday for the first time its about 40mm long at present.

[AbbasSTI]

Dr Mike Oxgreen said:

I reckon this is worth reposting - Abbas STI went from this...



... To this...





How's it going, Abbas? Any more pictures? How's your seed germinating, or were you planning to turf? If you were seeding, you'd have wanted to get it going by now in Manchester; if turfing I guess you'll be starting soon. Really interested to see the next stage of the transformation!

Edited by Dr Mike Oxgreen on Monday 21st September 18:59

It's going well thanks
I used Lawnsmith seeds roughly 2 weeks ago with their starter fertiliser, a little fish fertiliser and lots of prayers. Here's a recent a pic:



Huge thanks to yourself and the other posters in this thread. A local landscaper told me I needed 5 tonnes of top soil + x, y & z. But with inspiration and information from this thread I'm nearly there for around £250ish

[RichB]

AbbasSTI said:

It's going well thanks
I used Lawnsmith seeds roughly 2 weeks ago with their starter fertiliser, a little fish fertiliser and lots of prayers. Here's a recent a pic:



Huge thanks to yourself and the other posters in this thread. A local landscaper told me I needed 5 tonnes of top soil + x, y & z. But with inspiration and information from this thread I'm nearly there for around £250ish

OOI what you going to do with the fence? Once you've got a nice green lawn you'll need to sort it out? Perhaps paint each panel a different shade of green?

[Dr Mike Oxgreen]

AbbasSTI said:

That's progressing very nicely indeed for just two weeks' growth. Well done!

[Condi]

smokeey said:

Hi guys, any advice on how to tackle this lawn. (

I was thinking petrol strimmer to get it down and then just using a flymo once it's down to a reasonable length. The trees / bushes round the edges, would a domestic hedge trimmer deal with cutting them back a bit or would I need something more powerful?
I was quoted £300 by a gardener to cut the grass and trim back the bushes, is that reasonable or is it worth doing myself?

Easy to sort yourself. Mine was in worse condition and you can tame them pretty quickly.

A stihl is a very expensive way of starting gardening though! I would buy a decent mower from ebay - managed to pick up a 5 year old Hayter with Honda engine for £50, got it serviced and sorted by a bloke in town for £30 and it runs great. £450 new - cost me £80, and would cut your grass without any issues at all. For the bushes just get a normal wood saw and some loppers. Could tackle it in a weekend including taking stuff to the tip and it would be a hell of a lot cheaper than spending £300 on some multifunction stihl gear you might use 3 times a year.

[Condi]

popeyewhite said:

Given your timeframe I'd just get the rake/scarifier on your grandmother's lawn this afternoon. When you get all the moss up there'll be nothing left to kill, and if you put mosskiller down you'd still have to thoroughly rake afterwards anyway. The only difference mosskiller will make is it may dessicate the moss slightly, reducing the amount you have to rake up.

Noooo... moss is a mold. If you just agitate without killing it you're just spreading spores around which will grow new moss. A pack of moss killer is about £10 and works within a few days so I think you're being daft not to. Along with that, iron sulphate makes grass greener as well. Im not sure what the interval between moss killer and selective herbicide is, probably non at all once its washed in, so a day or 2?

[Mr Bishi]

I killed off some large areas of my lawn weeds a few weeks ago with the aim to scarify and overseed when it had died off. However with all the rain we have had recently I haven't been able to get out and scarify and I am now worried it may be too late in the year for the new lawn to fully establish before the cold nights kick in?

Have I left it too late? Should I try and give it a light scarify even though it's wet? Would going around with a garden fork help speed up the drying process? Am I in trouble with the wife for destroying the grass and leaving it in a state all over winter?

[popeyewhite]

Condi said:

Noooo... moss is a mold. If you just agitate without killing it you're just spreading spores around which will grow new moss.

Yessss... Moss is not a mold. Moss does not spore the whole year round either, but has has two phases IIRC. Given the time frame mentioned in the OP, raking the stuff up would be most expeditious for the desired outcome.

[Dr Mike Oxgreen]

Well, I started soaking some seed last night.

I measured out 3kg of seed into a bucket, then stretched a pair of Mrs Oxgreen's tights over the lip of the bucket, and up-ended the whole lot into the tights. Could've gone horribly wrong, that!

I put the seed-filled tights into the bucket, filled it with luke-warm water from the shower, and put it in the airing cupboard.

This morning, I'm amazed to see that the water has gone coffee-coloured!

My plan is to drain and replace the water this evening, to reduce any risk of fungal infection and perhaps to re-oxygenate everything. Then I'll have a close look at the seed tomorrow morning (it'll have had 36 hours by then) and see if it's ready to sow. If not then I can leave it soaking and sow on Sunday.

I guess I'm looking for the first signs of the radicle root coming out. I assume it looks like a white nodule?? Or am I just looking for signs that the seeds have swollen and split open?

Edited to add: My plan is to mix the seed with some topsoil, which I'm hoping will coat each seed and help stop them clumping together, making them easier to throw around. Does that sound a viable plan?

Edited by Dr Mike Oxgreen on Friday 25th September 08:14

[jagnet]

Mr Bishi said:

Have I left it too late? Should I try and give it a light scarify even though it's wet? Would going around with a garden fork help speed up the drying process? Am I in trouble with the wife for destroying the grass and leaving it in a state all over winter?

Unless you're in the very far north, you still have time to get it done imho. Aerating will help it dry out. You want some moisture in the ground before scarifying, but too wet is as bad as too dry.

Dr Mike Oxgreen said:

This morning, I'm amazed to see that the water has gone coffee-coloured!

My plan is to drain and replace the water this evening, to reduce any risk of fungal infection and perhaps to re-oxygenate everything. Then I'll have a close look at the seed tomorrow morning (it'll have had 36 hours by then) and see if it's ready to sow. If not then I can leave it soaking and sow on Sunday.

I guess I'm looking for the first signs of the radicle root coming out. I assume it looks like a white nodule?? Or am I just looking for signs that the seeds have swollen and split open?

Edited to add: My plan is to mix the seed with some topsoil, which I'm hoping will coat each seed and help stop them clumping together, making them easier to throw around. Does that sound a viable

I'd sow once they start swelling and splitting. If you were chitting them in a moist soil mix you could wait a bit longer, but I'm always concerned that in water the frequent changes to avoid disease will wash away so much of the seed's own nutrient store. A whole lot safer sowing early.

Mixing it in with some sand or topsoil will make it a much easier to spread evenly as they get very clumpy on their own in that state.

[JimM169]

Mr Bishi said:

I killed off some large areas of my lawn weeds a few weeks ago with the aim to scarify and overseed when it had died off. However with all the rain we have had recently I haven't been able to get out and scarify and I am now worried it may be too late in the year for the new lawn to fully establish before the cold nights kick in?

Have I left it too late? Should I try and give it a light scarify even though it's wet? Would going around with a garden fork help speed up the drying process? Am I in trouble with the wife for destroying the grass and leaving it in a state all over winter?

I'm in the same position, was planning on scarifying this weekend but after a quick test last night the lawn is going to be more bare earth than grass when finished.

Do we go ahead with the scarifying and overseed now or leave it looking rough over winter and overseed in spring. Or would be better to call it a day for this year and wait until next year for both the scarify and seeding ?

I'm in the East Midlands if that makes a difference?

Thanks

[Dr Mike Oxgreen]

jagnet said:

I'd sow once they start swelling and splitting. If you were chitting them in a moist soil mix you could wait a bit longer, but I'm always concerned that in water the frequent changes to avoid disease will wash away so much of the seed's own nutrient store. A whole lot safer sowing early.

Ta! In that case I'll probably aim to sow tomorrow morning if they've swollen up.

One thing I forgot to mention: There's a fairly large patch of lawn that is in shade for most of the day now, and germination has been especially poor in this area. My plan is to put a generous helping of chitted seed down here, and throw a large piece of clear greenhouse bubble insulation over the top to try and trap what little warmth the sun is casting onto this area. My hope is that this will keep the temperature up by a few degrees, and will also help keep the pesky Virginia creeper leaves off. I might prop it up a bit with a stick to keep some air movement and reduce the risk of fungal infection.

In future I think I'll plan to overseed this area in the warmest part of summer, because it doesn't dry out to the same extent that the rest of the lawn does.

[Mr Bishi]

Thanks Jagnet, the forecast is dry for the next couple of days so I'll go out with the fork today and get the scarifier out tomorrow afternoon and hope that by that time it will have dried out enough.

[jagnet]

JimM169 said:

I'm in the same position, was planning on scarifying this weekend but after a quick test last night the lawn is going to be more bare earth than grass when finished.

Do we go ahead with the scarifying and overseed now or leave it looking rough over winter and overseed in spring. Or would be better to call it a day for this year and wait until next year for both the scarify and seeding ?

I'm in the East Midlands if that makes a difference?

Thanks

I would go ahead with it tbh unless your lawn suffers from excessive shade problems. Fast germinating seeds such as ryegrass will germinate in under a week in good conditions, so that still leaves reasonable time for them to establish before the winter really gets going. We're at the tail end of ideal conditions, but there's still plenty of cricket pitches and bowling greens that are only now getting their autumn renovations done so it's not uncommon to be doing it now.

Dr Mike Oxgreen said:

My plan is to put a generous helping of chitted seed down here, and throw a large piece of clear greenhouse bubble insulation over the top to try and trap what little warmth the sun is casting onto this area. My hope is that this will keep the temperature up by a few degrees, and will also help keep the pesky Virginia creeper leaves off. I might prop it up a bit with a stick to keep some air movement and reduce the risk of fungal infection.

That sounds like an ideal plan. The bubble wrap will help a lot.

[jagnet]

Mr Bishi said:

Thanks Jagnet, the forecast is dry for the next couple of days so I'll go out with the fork today and get the scarifier out tomorrow afternoon and hope that by that time it will have dried out enough.

That should be fine for all but the most clay like soil imho Tbh there was quite a lot of moisture in the ground last weekend when I did my neighbour's lawn, but so long as it's not saturated you'll be ok, and once scarified the thinning out of the lawn will help the remaining grass dry in the sun so that the seed doesn't stick to it and can be brushed down onto the soil. A good low cut beforehand also helps.

[Elderly]

I wonder if scarifying is really all it's cracked up to be?

During a wet summer we had a large marquee (with flooring) on part of the lawn for an event and left it up too long.
When it was dismantled, what had been the grass beneath it looked a bit like the Somme.

I borrowed a scarifier and scarified the area where the marquee had been
but left a small 'control' patch untreated.
I then scarified a small area of the grass away from where the marquee had been
(another control patch).

After a few weeks of growth and mowing, I could not tell which areas had been scarified and which areas had not..

[jagnet]

Elderly said:

I wonder if scarifying is really all it's cracked up to be?

As is so often the case, the answer is 'it depends'.

If you had a lawn without too much traffic and no moss problems, that had a reasonably high height of cut, growing in nice loamy soil, comprised of mostly bunch type grasses, fed with a fairly low but not too low level of nutrients, and your soil biology was nice and healthy with plenty of surface feeding earthworms and thatch degrading fungi then it's entirely conceivable that you might never need to scarify.

In such situations thatch production will remain at a low enough rate that the soil biology can deal with it fast enough that it doesn't start to build up. With bunch type grasses you naturally get less thatch as there aren't the stolons and rhizomes being produced. With minimal feeding there's enough nutrients to keep the grass healthy without producing rapid growth which leads to rapid thatch build up. With plenty of earthworms and minimal traffic you're getting much less compaction.

If those factors start moving away from the ideal, which is often that case when trying to grow a more ornamental lawn, or even when maintaining a family lawn, scarifying starts to become necessary.

When over seeding, then even if the lawn didn't strictly speaking need scarifying, it does help thin out the sward and open up the soil surface for the new seeds and so improve germination rates.

It's a rare lawn, however, that doesn't benefit from scarifying in some way. Even if there's no issue with thatch there's often lateral growth of the grasses that once removed helps to give the sward a much denser appearance. Cutting into the soil and slicing through shallow roots encourages deeper rooting and improved drought tolerance. The benefits may not always be immediately obvious, but for the long term health of the lawn it's well worth doing.

[popeyewhite]

Elderly said:

I wonder if scarifying is really all it's cracked up to be?

During a wet summer we had a large marquee (with flooring) on part of the lawn for an event and left it up too long.
When it was dismantled, what had been the grass beneath it looked a bit like the Somme.

I borrowed a scarifier and scarified the area where the marquee had been
but left a small 'control' patch untreated.
I then scarified a small area of the grass away from where the marquee had been
(another control patch).

After a few weeks of growth and mowing, I could not tell which areas had been scarified and which areas had not..

Means nothing if 1. The scarifier itself is rubbish, and 2. You don't know how to scarify properly, and 3. You weren't wearing your glasses.

As an aside it might have been better if control was the entire lawn untouched by the marquee, to offset any potential hazards which might interfere with the validity of the smaller patch of lawn untouched by the marquee (i.e. dog pissed on it, it had been weedkilled 6 months previously etc etc).

[knk]

Is it too late to overseed?
Live in South Wiltshire and it does seem pretty chilly. I don't want to waste the grass seed I bought so would it be better waiting for spring?

[Dr Mike Oxgreen]

knk said:

Is it too late to overseed?
Live in South Wiltshire and it does seem pretty chilly. I don't want to waste the grass seed I bought so would it be better waiting for spring?

I don't think it's too late in the south, but the sooner you do it the better now. If you can do it this weekend then go for it!