Unhappy Lawncare
Summer is a great time to relax with your lawn. Its not all about work. I knew someone who loved working on his lawn in the summer.
“Sun’s out, it’s nice and warm – best time of the year for lawn care!”
He used to say. And every day he’d find something to do – mowing, aerating, scarifying, killing moss – as if working through his entire annual programme in just four weeks. The result, of course, was one very unhappy lawn. Relax ! Its the summer, the time to enjoy your lawn.
But he did have a point – it is a great time to be outside, working in the garden; so what can you usefully do to your lawn in the summer? Apart from just enjoying it?
What can you actually do in the summer?
Like it or not, the answer is “not very much”. And there are two reasons for this:
1) the biggest impact of summer is a dry lawn, and any invasive technique like aeration and scarification will just make this worse, and
2) if your lawn looks really bad in mid-summer, the problems actually began many months earlier. The best you can do now is to treat it gently. Wait for the autumn rain and cool, when you can start doing some serious remedial work.
Of course, you could just relax with your lawn in the summer time or follow my friend’s overall goal of being outdoors and enjoying the garden. BUT do resist the urge to ‘get stuck in’ with your poor old lawn. Instead just do a couple of things so that you can enjoy it with a clear conscience:
Mowing
Relaxing in the summer not your thing ? Then you can mow it if it is still growing, but make sure the blades are really sharp and set high. Scalping the grass when it’s already stressed will just do it more harm. If you’re going away on holiday, do NOT be tempted to give it an extra short cut – you will just come back to a very dry and brown lawn!
Avoid aerating ..
and scarifying as this will lose what little precious moisture there still is in the sward and soil.
Feeding:
you can apply a summer feed like Nutrifusion, as this is organic and will happily sit there until a summer shower waters it in. Better still, is to keep an eye on the long-range weather forecast and get the feed down before the dry, hot period begins.
Edges
If you’re just itching to trim something, how about tidying up the edges? Make sure the tool’s blades are sharp, and then you can get some real gardening therapy as you restore those immaculate edges!
Re-seeding
If you absolutely can not relax with your lawn in the summer time and if you have some patches that need reseeding, you can do that. Even in the hottest, driest part of the summer, you can re-seed. But be prepared to water several times a day. Alas, it’s no good just giving it a daily drenching as the water will percolate too far down where it’s of no use to the seed.
Relax with your lawn in the summer
My advice is to let the summer time be the time to relax and enjoy your lawn. Few gardens look their very best mid-summer – it’s just part of nature’s cycle; so find something else to admire and tend. And before you know it, the Autumn will restore colour and vigour to your lawn – and then is the time to start doing some serious lawn care!