Regular Maintenance

Air, food and water - the staple diet of all living organisms, and grass is no different. Get these ingredients right and you are well on the way to having a good looking, healthy lawn.

Aeration - Can be done as often as you want throughout the year. It would be extremely difficult to over-aerate. Cricket squares apart, professional groundsmen and greenkeepers are constantly aerating to varying depths, but they do have the machines and the manpower do it. Most householders do not.

If you have a particularly compacted area, try and borrow or hire a hollow coring machine. This removes cores of soil and leave lovely holes in the lawn, allowing plenty of air to get to the grass roots. The holes will soon close up as the de-compacted soil spreads and breathes.

Regular forking, by hand or machine, will be sufficient for most areas.

Watering - Professionals use the term irrigation, but it's the same thing. Grass needs water, particularly during long, dry spells. Rather than regular, daily watering, it's better to drench the lawn thoroughly then leave for 3 or 4 days. This encourages the roots to go searching deeper into the soil.

Feeding - grass plants require nutrients which they take from the soil. The nutrients required are nitrogen, potassium and phosphate. In the professional world the groundsman or greenkeeper takes soil samples to determine the level of nutrients in the soil before they feed. They then select a fertiliser to redress or maintain the correct level of nutrients.

For most lawns a feed in Spring, a top-up feed in the Summer and an Autumn feed, using propriety products will suffice.

Mowing - clean, sharp blades will give a better looking and healthier lawn. Keep the height at around 25mm (1 inch). Most lawn grasses will be put under stress, and will struggle in harsh conditions such as drought, if maintained much lower than this.

At the start of the growing season, start at the highest cut, just taking the tops off the grass, and gradually reduce the height on subsequent cuts. The general rule of thumb is not to remove more than one third of the grass height at any one cut. Do not cut in the same direction each time, cut in different directions to encourage the grass to stand up. To get the professional, banding effect your mower needs to have a good roller.

If possible, remove the cuttings on every cut. The exception is during drought conditions when the cuttings should be left on the surface to help retain moisture in the ground.

Edging - if using long handled shears, make sure they are the right length for you. Try different ones until you are comfortable with your choice. The job can be strenuous enough without damaging your back.

Some of the petrol and electric strimmers now on the market also do a decent job, in a fraction of the time!

Damaged edges should be tidied up using a half moon to get as clean a cut as possible.

Scarification - usually done in Spring and again in Autumn to remove thatch and debris from the lawn surface. More information about thatch can be found elsewhwere on this site.

For small lawns a wire tine rake will be sufficient, but it can be a back breaking job on larger areas. Hire a machine or, better still, buy one between a group of fellow lawn enthusiasts. There's some decent ones on the market, electric and petrol.

If you haven't scarified for many years, you will be surprised at the amount of debris. Don't worry, the lawn will benefit from the removal of all the rubbish and, with overseeding and feeding, it will be lush in no time.

The Spring scarification is really preparing the lawn for feeding, and overseeding in some cases. The Autumn work is to remove leaves, dying grass and debris, ready for overseeding.

Top Dressing - normally done in the Autumn, sometimes in Spring, after scarification and hollow coring. Top dresing is a mixture of sand/peat/loam and is used to fill in any depressions in the lawn i.e. levelling. The mixture will also aid the drainage of the soil.

Unless there are major problems with the lawn levels, or you are on a mission to create the perfect lawn, top dressing is not essential in most cases.