2023 Lawn Thread

[s91]

What are people's thoughts on those hand cranked spreaders for sowing seed & fertiliser, lawn will be around 80sqm.
Worth the £20? Or just throw it down by hand?

[jimmyjimjim]

dhutch said:

Very interesting, I don't know much about your weather, cold and dry much of they year? What involved in making it grow, other than removing the snow and early as possible?

In my more annoyed days, I'd say that it's cold and dry for 7 months of the year, and hot and dry for the remaining 7 months.

Shorter growing season and a very, very, very dry one, needing irrigation are the main things.

Crap soil, too.

[Terry Winks]

So just out of interest what activities can be carried out in the current conditions? I look at my job list as in no particular order

1. Kill Moss
2. Scarify/Turn over soil
3. Add new top soil to help level out (there is a big gulley where the oak tree roots are running)
4. Fertiliser
5. Seed, seed and seed again
6. Feed, feed and feed again
7. Hope for the best under the trees

[McGee_22]

s91 said:

What are people's thoughts on those hand cranked spreaders for sowing seed & fertiliser, lawn will be around 80sqm.
Worth the £20? Or just throw it down by hand?

If you’re talking about the hand held devices it depends a little bit on what you’re spreading - if it’s anything like a moss killer that can leave severe burn marks if it clumps at all then they are excellent. I gave up on those wheeled spreaders quite a few years ago - they just jam up and cause more work than they attempt to solve. I use the wickes hand held for spreading the evergreen 4 in 1 stuff as it has a trigger operated gate that stops all the stuff falling out when you’re not cranking, and the gate size is adjustable too to vary the dose/amount.

[redrabbit29]

Fed up of trying with our lawn. We are surrounded by trees which is nice but over the Autumn and Winter there are stacks and stacks of leaves - can't realistically dispose of them as there are thousands.

There is sunlight between about 10-3

We've made some admittedly half-hearted efforts with shady grass seeds. I do need to try harder though, just not sure how worthwhile it is.

EDIT: just to add we don't walk over that muddy bit to the shed, we walk around the paved area

Edited by redrabbit29 on Tuesday 7th March 11:54

[jimmyjimjim]

Don't eat the blue snow in Colorado....



...as its been sprayed with tenacity.

[darreni]

redrabbit29 said:

Fed up of trying with our lawn. We are surrounded by trees which is nice but over the Autumn and Winter there are stacks and stacks of leaves - can't realistically dispose of them as there are thousands.

There is sunlight between about 10-3

We've made some admittedly half-hearted efforts with shady grass seeds. I do need to try harder though, just not sure how worthwhile it is.

EDIT: just to add we don't walk over that muddy bit to the shed, we walk around the paved area

Edited by redrabbit29 on Tuesday 7th March 11:54

You could chuck some seed in those gutters!

[sutoka]

s91 said:

What are people's thoughts on those hand cranked spreaders for sowing seed & fertiliser, lawn will be around 80sqm.
Worth the £20? Or just throw it down by hand?

I bought a cheap push one from a DIY shed last October to put Autumn lawn stuff. Set it at the correct level according to the manufacturers instructions, basically it was useless and dumped the wrong amounts onto my lawn. Had to spread it out with a rake but it brunt parts of my lawn.

Emailed the manufucturer and they admitted they'd had faults and dozens of complaints about them. However they decided they would still send them out to shop to sells. They refunded me for the st product but wouldn't compensate for the few quid I had to spend to rectify it.

[dhutch]

I've have great success with a cheap second hand Scott's Evergreen rotary spreader, little bit of trial and error for the application rate obviously but it appears to go on fairly evenly even with my slightly mixed ability to push it in a straight line and even distance from the next run.

I measure out the right amount of whatever I'm spreading, plus a bit extra I aim to leave in the machine, the a mid-strength rate so if I get a bit over it doesn't burn. Set the knob at about what is needed for a half application, and find this typically allows me to put to passes on, and have a bit left to to touch up some bits I want a slightly higher dose, and tip back the extra bit that's hard to get out of the machine or just use it up. The pass width is fairly wide, and the distribution is a sort of bell-curve so the overlap is soft edged and isn't so critical.

At which point I don't see why the hand held rotarys shouldn't be ok too. The LawnSmith guy rates then, and sells want I'm sure is a good one. Obviously you get the product on your shoes, so not ideal for lawn sand unless you have wellies!

I got no dice with the Scots drop spreader I inherited from the previous owners, on a large ish (400sqm) family lawn (mixed grasses) it's not possible to see where you have been accurately enough, even with two passes you could clearly see the missed and overlapped sections. Obviously it's very digital, it applies full dose upto the edge of the hopper, then nothing, so the hard edge is very noticeable. The pass width is also much narrower, so it takes ages too. Maybe suitable for a smaller or more perfectly neat lawn, or if you have a lot of narrow paths etc.

[Condi]

Problem with doing anything by hand is you'll never get a good spread, which for some things matters more than others. At least with a rotary spreader the spread will be even, even if the application rate is hard to difficult to calibrate.

[renmure]

We just moved on October from a house in the countryside with 5 acres of garden to, err, a street and civilization and (OMG) neighbours!!



This was a brochure pic. It is really deceptive as the front lawn is at least 80% moss. Even in October my little ride-on mower just sat on top of it then sunk down. It's like walking on 4 inches of fuzzy felt. The back garden is a good bit bigger thankfully, but again is almost complete moss.

The neighbours all have lovely green lawns and while I like getting stuck into a project I think I'm going to get someone in to do the manual stuff at the beginning. For the front, I've been quoted £1500 for scarifying (2 men, 2 days apparently) including unlimited trailer loads of removed moss, full seed and re-seed plus 2 feed and fertilizer treatments. I think I'm going to go with it then make a decision about maybe tackling the rear garden myself in autumn or pay the same again for them to do it.

[McGee_22]

I'm sure I've posted it before but I gave up on those wheeled drag along spreaders and bought one of these...

https://www.wickes.co.uk/Wickes-Hand-Held-Lawn-Spr...

[Patch1875]

You have to spend a bit of money to get a decent spreader don’t buy a drop one they are awful.

I have a lawn care company and this is what we use.




The base model would be pretty good for home use but appears to be double the price of what they were a couple of years ago.

https://www.lawnmowersdirect.co.uk/product/icl-acc...


A coated and protected fertiliser will be much safer to use to avoid scorching, moss killer we use iron sulphate dissolved in water and sprayed on via a knapsack spayed.

[boyse7en]

Is now a good time to scarify my lawn and add some seed to the bare bits, or is it too wet? Got clay soil so I'm nervous about compaction.

[redrabbit29]

darreni said:

You could chuck some seed in those gutters!

I know! It's the downsides of living in an area completely surrounded by very tall trees.

The gutters all need clearing out. They have those funny brush things in them so that thankfully does allow water to still filter through but not as effectively obviously

[AyBee]

renmure said:

We just moved on October from a house in the countryside with 5 acres of garden to, err, a street and civilization and (OMG) neighbours!!



This was a brochure pic. It is really deceptive as the front lawn is at least 80% moss. Even in October my little ride-on mower just sat on top of it then sunk down. It's like walking on 4 inches of fuzzy felt. The back garden is a good bit bigger thankfully, but again is almost complete moss.

The neighbours all have lovely green lawns and while I like getting stuck into a project I think I'm going to get someone in to do the manual stuff at the beginning. For the front, I've been quoted £1500 for scarifying (2 men, 2 days apparently) including unlimited trailer loads of removed moss, full seed and re-seed plus 2 feed and fertilizer treatments. I think I'm going to go with it then make a decision about maybe tackling the rear garden myself in autumn or pay the same again for them to do it.

Looks HUGE! I wouldn't be scared of doing that yourself to be honest (if you have the time, of course), it's no more difficult than running a mower around the place and you could buy a decent scarifier yourself for well under £1500 and I'm sure you could find a hidden corner to get rid of what you dig up. If the moss problem is as bad as you say, I'd be killing it off first before scarifying.

[renmure]

AyBee said:

Looks HUGE! I wouldn't be scared of doing that yourself to be honest (if you have the time, of course), it's no more difficult than running a mower around the place and you could buy a decent scarifier yourself for well under £1500 and I'm sure you could find a hidden corner to get rid of what you dig up. If the moss problem is as bad as you say, I'd be killing it off first before scarifying.

I'm not keen on paying folk to do stuff I should probably be able to do myself but I really expect a mountain of moss and if the man-hours for doing it are right I'm not sure about the time. I think I'll pay to have the front done then get an idea from that about whether I might tackle the back. I believe keeping on top of it all over the years will involve a bit more regular scarifying and feeding so I might treat the front as a learning experience.

[dhutch]

renmure said:

I'm not keen on paying folk to do stuff I should probably be able to do myself but I really expect a mountain of moss and if the man-hours for doing it are right I'm not sure about the time. I think I'll pay to have the front done then get an idea from that about whether I might tackle the back. I believe keeping on top of it all over the years will involve a bit more regular scarifying and feeding so I might treat the front as a learning experience.

Hard to see how big it is, but it's certainly true that driving the machine round it the easy bit. You can hire one easily enough, and it's not too hard to get your head round what depth to do it, but if you have a lot of moss it's a fair game to rake it all up and barrow it to a compost heap. More so if you want to take it off site. A lot of the pros use a leaf blower to take wrecking yourself raking!

I've done our 400sqm myself in a day, but it's half as mossy and you describe.

Equally I don't know where in the world you are, but £375 per man day is bloody good going for anyone, especially if one of them is a lad manning a barrow.

[BigRickus]

Missed a crucial step last autumn and didn’t winter fertilise. Lawn a bit mossy, bit ‘limp’ and yellow etc at the moment.
Will be starting to think about spring maintenance in a month or sos time but is there any product I can get on the lawn to do the next 4-6 weeks, toughen it and get it ready for a light scarify and over seed in late April.
Want sure if a garden center combined weed/feed/moss killer type thing would be worth a go.
Based just outside west London.
Many thanks!

[Dr Mike Oxgreen]

boyse7en said:

Is now a good time to scarify my lawn and add some seed to the bare bits, or is it too wet? Got clay soil so I'm nervous about compaction.

No, it’s too early.

Scarifying is an aggressive process that unavoidably damages the lawn. It relies on the grass growing actively so that it repairs itself reasonably quickly and comes back stronger. You therefore need to wait until the grass is growing strongly, not just ticking over as it is now. Also, autumn is a far better time to scarify than spring in my opinion, because the soil temperature is much warmer.

And putting seed down now is also too early. It’s the soil temperature, not the air temperature, that determines when it’s time to seed - you need a soil temperature of about 10°C, and we’re nowhere near that, even in the south of the country. Soil temperature lags behind the air temperature, so a few warm-ish days won’t raise the soil temperature by much. And we haven’t really had any significantly warm days yet.

I see you’re in Devon, so you can probably start these things earlier than most, but it’s still too early even for you, in my opinion. The next few weeks should hopefully change things significantly, so it’s well worth waiting until at least early-to-mid April. You’ll get much better results. I’d just give it a thorough raking rather than a full-on scarification, then get your seed down and cover it with a thin layer of compost or topsoil (no more than a few millimetres).

Edited by Dr Mike Oxgreen on Saturday 11th March 08:03