What about you! The start of the season here.
I've been trying to get a decent stripe burnt into my lawn.
I've made a classic mistake, but before we get into it - let's get the grass cut.
We have the daffodils here in the garden, now strictly speaking you should leave those there for another few weeks
to let these leaves here gather up enough energy for next year.
But it's a bit of an eyesore, so we're going to cut those down now.
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Now let's get on with it ............
Now, to get a nice stripe in a lawn, to get a lawn looking like this
what we do , we "burn the stripe in". So what I mean by that, is just going up and down the same stripe,
until the stripe becomes really, really apparent.
and then, whenever I'm happy with how that looks, then we'll start crosscutting.
My problem being, I haven't been here enough. The lawn should be cut at least
twice a week. At the minute it's just getting cut once a week,
and although I'm starting to get the stripes burnt in,
the grass is quite long whenever I come here, so whenever I come here it's starting just to roll over
in the direction that we're cutting
and it's causing the condition I'm going to show now
I'm really pleased with how the lawn looks, however
continually cutting stripes int he one direction to burn the stripes in can cause some problems
especially because I've been really busy. Anybody who has seen my Videos from a few weeks ago
talked about really struggling to keep up with my work
and getting this lawn cut was something I could only do once a week
and it did get away from me a bit so I have come across a bit of an issue. resolving it step by step. Let's go ........
Regular Viewers of the Channel will know what this is. This is a prism gauge.
An expensive bit of glass with a magnifying glass, and we use it just to measure the height of cut.
I'm going to show you some of the issues I'm having with the lawn here.
We're going to use this, but we're also going to use the tape measure.
So we take this prism gauge and we set it down on the lawn and it shows us the height of cut.
When we look in there we can see the different heights.
Now, the problem I'm faced with, we're continually cutting the grass in the one direction.
What it's doing, it's rolling the grass down, so I'm going to show you something I've discussed.
The grass rolls down, and we put the prism gauge down on the lawn, and it looks as if it's cutting the right height
but whenever we just give the lawn a quick swipe, all of a sudden you can see that grass coming up!
I don't think we need the prism gauge to measure this with!
We're just going to use the old fashioned tape measure. The grass is actually about 100 mil on the tape measure.
Obviously this is a bit of an issue. Now, generally I would get the verti cutter out, or my scarifyer, and give it a really light scarify
just to lift that grass up However, I put down fertiliser pills not so long ago
and if I start verticutting, it'll risk damaging those little pills.
So what we're going to do is, we're going to take the mower, and we're going to cut in that direction and then we're going to cut in that direction
and see if it starts to lift it up. If it doesn't, then we're going to have to think about verticutting
or giving it a brush.. So let's do that now .........
Let's just have a quick look. I've only only done a couple of stripes to see if it's made any difference.
So here's the bit I've gone up and down over.. You can clearly see that all that grass there
is just still lying over so we're going to have to take more extreme measures just to
get this lifted. So we've tried parallel and it didn't work
so now we're going to have to go Plan B and get the verticutter out and just run over the top of it.
I've got my old scarifier out of the shed. We haven't started this in a while so we'll have a look and see if it starts.
For my next job then I'm going to take the Milwaukee mower out and cut all the debris off this.
So I'm just going to give a wee shout out to my sponsors, Milwaukee Tools UK
who sponsor the Channel. Actually, this lawnmower is provided to me, It's a turbo mower and it does a really really good job, lifted, lifting all the debris off the lawn.
Just to have a look across the lawn. All the debris is off it and we can also see how grass is siting up.
The verticutter has just ct it and lifted it all up.
And the lawn mower over it has just cut it all off.
Now we've got all that done, my next job, gonna get the lawnmower out and I'm going to run down those same stripes again.
There'll be some of you saying , "Don't be doing that!" but I don't want to liose the stripes that I've got "burnt in".
And then, start cutting across.
If we have a look at some of the grass that's come out of this, we can see there's quite a number of thick stems, and that's really po ana!
If you want to learn all about po ana - watch this Video next
and I'll see you over there now .............