What aout you! Today I'm going to show you a Beginner's Guide on how to Scarify
your Lawn - everything you need from start to finish. We're going to talk
about the tools that you need, how to identify thatch and moss, and I'm going
to show you three different ways to kill the moss in your lawn. Let's go ..........
So now we've started into it, and we're cutting the grass. I get a lot of questions about whether or
not you should cut the grass, and what height you should cut it at. Now dependent on what you're
trying to achieve, if you're thinking about over seeding your lawn then it might be helpful
scalping the grass away down. Alternatively, if you're grass is really long, then you're probably going to
want to cut it very short, because it's going to make it a lot easier to get into with the
scarifier. But something that I would say is, if you really scalp your grass down and you're just
scarifying, then it's going to take a lot longer for the grass to recover. So there's swings and
roundabouts to what you do and there's no right and wrong, it just depends on your own garden.
To explain to you why we scarify - I've pulled this core out of the lawn you can see there's
quite a bit of moss on the top of it there, and whenever we look at the side profile of it,
you can see that up the top we have our moss and our grass, and then this lighter brown
layer is known as "thatch", and then we have our soil. Whenever you have a lot of thatch
in your lawn, then it starts to become an issue. It blocks air, water and light from
getting down into the roots. The best way - and really the only way - to get it out is to scarify it.
So scarifying is just taking a tool and ripping that out, and it just pulls it all out.
We've got the grass cut. Our next step is now to scarify the lawn. I've
got a couple of manual tools here that you can use to scarify your lawn. I'm just
going to show you, this is our first hole we have the manual scarifyer,
you can see these blades on it, they're shaped to the take stuff out.
You see the moss and the thatch that's been pulled out in that very short space of time.
So this method works well, these blades pull out, a lot out. But it's hard work. If you don't have
that scarifying rake I just showed you, you might have one of these here in your shed.
These are an old-fashioned type of rake, a bulldog metal rake, and the teeth on it are really good.
A spring tine rake, really good for ripping out the moss. We'll have a go with this now.
To show you quickly - so with the spring back rake, we only took out a small amount whenever
we go up to here, and with this tool, you can see all the extra material we took out.
Nearly triple the amount with this tool as opposed to this one. Tools like this here are perfect for
smaller spaces, 50, 100 square meters. Any more than 100 square meters they're probably not going to
want to use something like this. You're going to be looking at an electric scarifier, there's a lot
of different electric scarifiers you can buy in around 100 to 200 pounds, but if you have a a bigger lawn
then you're probably going to use a tool like this here. This is actually a professional scarifier.
Now you could hire one of these for the day, they are quite expensive to buy, so
the best option is probably to hire it. You could hire in the blower as well,
it's going to make tidying up a lot easier. So let's go on with the scarifying now. ........
What height do you set the scarifier att? You just want the blades to tickle the surface.
You don't want the blades to go into the soil, and you want them to go into the grass.
Your better to set the scarifier to a high height, and bring it down slowly, and just test it out
yourself. You can always run over it again, what you don't want to do is you don't want to put holes
in your lawn. So if this is your first time scarifying, just set the scarifier to high height, do a
couple of passes and then put it down, and over time you'll get the experience behind what you
need to be taken out or not. But you're better taking out less, and that way the lawn's gonna
recover faster than putting a lot of holes into your lawn - and perhaps damaging your equipment too!
You can see there, we've taken a wee bit out, but not very much so I'm going to put it down another bit and have another go.
There you go. We've done one pass. Now if you had an electric scarifier, chances are you would want
to rake all this up before you went over it again. As that is a petrol powered scarifier, and it's very
powerful, I'm just going to put it down a bit in height, and I'm gonna go over it again and do it a second time.
Let's do that now .................
Now that the lawn is single scarified, now we're going to do it double. To explain
what I mean, we go in one direction then we'll go the other, so if you if you bring your lines your
second line in line with that one you're going to take out the least amount. Whenever you start going
across your cut, so if you're going perpendicular you're going to take the most out the closer you
bring those lines together the less less harsh you are on the turf. So that's the hardest, and going
straight up and down along the same lines that's the least amount you're going to take out, but
whenever you bring those lines together then you start to be harder on your turf.
We have the lawn all scarified, I'm going to show you a couple of tools to clean up. The Bulldog rake that we used to do
the scarifying, you can use one of these here, but it can be slow going. Something that's a lot better
is these rakes here. You'll see these rakes in a lot of my Videos. Now I'm going to show you a wee
secret behind how to use them without hurting your back. You can use these here all day long
really, really easy. Now if you want to support the Channel, I'm going to leave a Link down below, you
can pick one of these rakes up on no extra cost to yourself. So let's start with the raking ...........
So the secret to using using these rakes
is to keep your back straight and keep this upright.
A lot of people would lean down in, and put that in, and it's a lot harder to push along or pull
along, so if you keep your, you keep your back straight, this actually flicks the grass up.
Now we've got all this lifted we're going to go up into the workshop and have a chat about
the best way to kill moss in your lawn. I'm going to show you three different ways. Let's go now ...........
In the UK there's nothing that you can put on your lawn that kills moss! How we kill moss in a lawn
is we put iron on it, and iron dehydrates it, and I'm going to show you that shortly.
So if you're using an electric scarifier, or if you're using a manual rake, you might want to put the
iron on beforehand and it sits in the surface, and it's going to burn the surface. However if
you watch a lot of my Videos, whenever we're doing the scarifying we put the iron on afterwards, and why
that is, because with the professional tools we're clearing, we're clearing that moss out of the lawn,
and if you think of the grass plant sitting up, and iron can get right down into the base,
because the iron doesn't kill it it just dries it out, and dehydrates it. If you have a lot of this
material here, if you have a big deep bed of thatch and you're putting the moss controller on the top,
well then you're just going to burn it. Now the downside to doing it afterwards is, you can't seed
the lawn at the same time. If you want to seed your lawn you have to leave a space in between putting
the iron on, and then doing your seeding. Show you the three products that kill moss on your lawn.
The first product we have is the liquid iron. Really good if you have a small space. Measure
out what you need and spray it on, the downside the, with the liquid iron is, it's more expensive. If you
want the cheaper option or if you have a bigger garden, then something that you can't go wrong to
a soluble iron. You mix this up in some water, and then you spray it on, but the key thing, the soluble
iron is you need a set of scales. You need to weigh out exactly what you need. Third method to kill
moss on your lawn and it's something really good - especially if you're just starting out?
Is lawn sand. If you want to learn all about lawn
sand watch this Video next. I'll see you over there now ..........................