Three years ago this lawn was a complete disaster.
It was covered in every different type of grass that you could think of.
I had to take matters into my own hand and we had to do something drastic.
In August 2020 I made a bold move, I killed off the entire lawn, and we started again
from scratch.
I scarified off the old lawn, aerated it, seeded it , soiled it, leveled it and sewed
it with fresh grass seed.
I watered it religiously and I watched it grow.
After the lawn went in it was pure bliss.
It looked amazing.
Brilliant.
However those weed grasses, those weed grasses, it wasn't long before they started to appear
into the lawn.
Despite all my efforts. My weed grass, my enemy is poa annua, or annual meadowgrass,
or Meadow grass for people in America.
If you're new to lawn care and you want to know what a weed grass is, a weed grass is
a plant that has started growing in your lawn and it's totally uninvited.
Most of the time it'll look completely different to the rest of the lawn, taking away from the
lawn's appearance. Initially I thought that the weed seeds were blowing in from this field
beside me here, and I even made a joke about being, "some might say, I'm an expert in my field".
Bad joke as it may be
This weed grass had become my Nemesis, it's time, we're gonna have to take some drastic
measures. Before I tell you my plan what we're going to do, really important thing, don't forget
SMASH that LIKE BUTTON! Let's get on with it ....... so this is it this is my Big Plan folks. I'm
going to get the Roundup on and the welly boots and the protective gear, I'll let you into the secret.
I'm not going to kill off the lawn. that's going to be far too much work. The test,
that's the area, what we'd really have to do is, we would have to kill off the entire
lawn and then we'd have to do a couple of different tests, at least two tests maybe more,
to see if scarifying it off, or lifting the turf off works or doesn't work. My thinking
is you'll have to at least kill it all off, put the lawn into two halves, lift the turf
off with turf cutter, and the other half scarify off the way we did the first time round,
and then reseed it, and then just watch over the next two or three years to see whether the
weed grasses come in - or not. To be honest with you, it's far too much work!
The most obvious thing if you have weed grasses in your lawn, and this comes from someone
that has done everything, it's just to learn to live with it and to manage it, so that's
what we're going to focus on today. The basic things you can do to manage the weed grasses
in your lawn, I'm not looking to redesign the wheel on how to look after weed grasses. The
two most important things on managing weed grasses in your lawn is this here, and the
first one is how you cut your grass. Regular mowing is your best friend. Usually whenever
you come you see me filming, here the lawn is all striped up. At the minute we've cut
a lot of the stripes out of the lawn because the grass has started to lie over quite a
bit. Between regular mowing, changing the pattern that you cut the grass, that is your biggest
friend for dealing with weed grasses. Second up is that machine there. Scarifying or verti cutting.
I don't have a verti cutter, so we just use the scarifier just on a higher height.
Here's our weed grass here. . So whenever we're verti cutting
we're putting lines across it and that's going to cut into it and cut those stems off.
So that's the lawn all scarified. Now, I used to always rake this up, blow it and rake it
up, but I've actually found this mower here it does a really good job. Just lifting
all the debris from the scarifying.
So that's the grass cut. You can see the amount of debris that came out of it. The Milwaukee
mower does a really good job on the high powered mode. The reason that we have that stripe
is because we went over the same stripe as the scarifyer. One of the best things you can do
to combat the weed grass is to change the direction of your cut. So I'm going to get
the John Deere cylinder mower out, and we're going to cut the grass, but we're not going
to go over those same stripes.
Grass all cut. I'm going to say, going to say, if you have weed grasses in your lawn,
just learn to live with them, enjoy them and manage them. If you want
to learn all about a trade secret on Liquid Feeds, watch this Video next, and I'll see you
over there now ........