Hello it's Austin Jarrett from Allett Mowers. This is episode 5 of our lawn renovation project.
We weren't really happy with the amount of weeds and the colours that we were getting
in our lawn and we decided we were going to choose some lawn seed and we weren't
entirely happy with the information we were given because we didn't really understand the type of
lawn we were going to get so we've actually sewn six different varieties in the garden
and we're going to go through that whole journey here. We are now eight weeks since over-seeding.
If you haven't seen the previous episodes then they're worth a watch but you can start to see now
that we've got a lawn back and it's looking okay. We're going to go and have a look now at the trial
tubs which gives us a more intensive look at the different varieties that we've got and today we're
going to be cylinder mowing and we're going to give it a quick verticut as well and i'll talk
to you about the reasons why we're going to do that so let's go and have a look at the tubs.
So here we are eight weeks on and you can start to see now the real different characteristics
of each of the different mixtures. So these two are the fine mixtures where we've got
90% fescues 10 bents this one's an 80% fescue and 20% brown top bent you can see definitely
a lot finer sort of feel it feels more like stroking hair. Then we've got ones
that are predominantly ryegrass this is a quality one we're talking about
more general purpose quality lawns we've got 70% ryegrass and 30% percent fescues and you can see
now the fescues are starting to come through the ryegrass definitely came through first
and in this one here which you can see is significantly greener than all the others as well
and they've had all exactly the same treatment we're down to a 40 percent rye grass on this one,
35 percent slender creeping red fescue 20 percent chewing fescues and 5 percent now
with brown top bent in here. 100 percent ryegrass and this was really the quickest establishing of
the six different mixtures and then this one is the one that's in the shade
not such a good test for this one because it's in the full light rather than the shade
but actually in the sample itself it's really coming on it was the slowest to get going
but now it's warmed up and we've got plenty of water on it really seems
to be coming into its own so steady but it's definitely going to be getting there.
So what I want to look at actually is in the sward we're starting to get a bit of a problem
and of course the reason we did this trial was because we weren't happy with the weed levels
in the original lawn the idea was was to kill off the lawn over-seed with varieties that we
knew so that if we got patches that died either because of urine or we were killing off weed
patches that we would have the seed to be able to replace areas and we'd get the lawn looking great
but what i do want to have a look at is the weed infestation we've got now
eight weeks on and how i've really got to get on and do something about this now.
So here we are on an area of lawn that's really established quite well but of course
we do have a problem and already we're starting to see the weed grasses come through
and at the moment they're just fairly small plants these weed grasses the first one i want to talk
to you about is about the poa annua. So what does poa annua look like and you can see here
it's quite easy to spot because of the seed heads so if i dig this plant
out which is what i'm starting to do i'm taking a knife i'm cutting around
the base of the plant so i can lift out the roots of this and what i've done is i've now plucked out
quite a large area of just in one plant. I'm mowing this at about 40 millimetres just here but
you can see already some of this grass is already six inches 150 millimetres long but of course
it's lying flat in the sward and it's giving the opportunity for it to go to seed and we have these
seed heads which are so characteristic of the annual meadow grass so that's annual meadowgrass
poa potensis sorry poa annua. The poa annua itself is just if you want to talk about a plant that is
a survivor this is the plant that you see growing inbetween paving stones in gutters through tarmac
and this will survive pretty much anywhere. Very shallow rooting and you'll notice it at different
times of the year in your lawn because it's a little bit yellow and the leaves are coarse
but how this reproduces the plant itself only lasts for one year that's the annual in annual
meadowgrass but what it does is it's a prolific seed producer. So this is flowering and seeding
up to every 10 days it's producing hundreds of seeds per plant and of course a percentage of
those will germinate this autumn and i'll end up with a growing situation of of poa annua on this
lawn so i need to do something about this now even though this sward is only eight weeks old.
It is really prolific and one of the things that we've learned is to get an early established
good sward is actually the most important thing i need my plants that i want in this case it's a
60 percent ryegrass in this quality one lawn and a
40 percent creeping slender red fescue. I need to get that established as early as possible
because these are growing wherever there's a gap in this poor establishment.
We're actually doing a program of two things in order to overcome this the earlier i do it while
the lowest number of plants ever at this early stage i can tackle it and really start to make
a difference. I am literally going around with the kitchen knife don't tell the wife and i am digging
each one of these plants out that i see them i generally are seeing them because of the seed
heads and i'm plucking these out and out of this lawn i'm plucking hundreds and hundreds of these.
The easiest way to do it is of course and this is the importance of good mowing
is that what i need to do is i need to get these seed heads collected and in the grass box so
very regular mowing 10 day cycle remember very regular mowing and collecting the grass clippings
and secondly what i'm going to do is more regular verticutting so even though these plants are quite
young what i need to do is to get these seed heads to stand up in the sward and then i can mow them
off and get these seed heads interrupted in their life cycle so that next year i'm not just going
to have an even bigger problem that i can't combat so i'm on to this really really early.
Of course once i've removed those weeds because i wanted to remove the roots as well i've taken
a chunk of soil and so i need to now just fill in the holes to some extent i don't want the
seed in too deep otherwise it won't germinate so i'll just fill in the bottom of these holes
and then what i'll do is of course i know exactly
the seed mixture now that's the advantage of what it is that we've
done.
Make sure the seed's not sitting on the grass that it's contacting the soil and then i just need to
put a covering over those seeds and i'll get this watered
and i'll put the
seed that i really want back into its competitive position and make sure that we keep this sward
nice and thick so we don't have any gaps in it where the annual meadow grass will take over.
The second grass weed which has been infesting this eight week old lawn is Yorkshire Fog.
Yorkshire fog is a much broader leaf weed and it normally is identified by the hairy leaves
that it has but again it's another flat growing grass weed which slips underneath the mower and
then just continues to spread. This one is not as bad to deal with as the annual meadow grass the
reason for that being is it this is a bit of a light weight compared with annual meadow grass
it really doesn't like agitation it doesn't like traffic and often good continuous verticutting as
part of your lawn maintenance will keep this under control but there's no doubt while the lawn is in
this state that actually i can pull these grass weeds out i'm cutting and removing some of the
root and actually these will be gone in no time at all but you can see how this is starting to spread
from one quite small plant and that i need to get these eliminated as quickly as i possibly can.
There's no seed heads on these so it's not spreading on a 10 day seed head cycle but all
the same i need to get rid of these weeds where i can and i can hand pull them like this with as
much root as i possibly can or what i'm going to do is i'm going to get verticutting verticutting
it doesn't like and then on top of that while the grass is stood upright i can mow it and
reduce the amount of leaf that it's got for that essential photosynthesis so that it's just nowhere
near as competitive against these beautiful rye grass plants that we really want to see.
So we can dig these out all individually and already there are thousands i'm definitely
going to be on a losing battle and so we need to contain this grass as best as we possibly can.
So in the annual meadow grass the seed heads here are the things that we're going to try and
collect and make sure that those aren't seeding ready for next year to attack us then.
One of the cultural practices which are really accepted is the use of a verticut and i have
the verticut cartridge here you can see these blades steel blades and what they're able to do
is to cut into the sward and what they'll do is with these grassy leaves that you can see in the
stalks you can see how high this actually is if i can take that and get it standing upright it's
going to be so much easier to be able to mow that off and be able to collect that seed head
so that it doesn't seed for next year so let's see how that goes.
So i've used the verticut now to go in two directions and the reason being that the
the annual meadow grass plant grows from a single point and then grows flat like this
so i need to be able to get as many of the leaves as i can by going in multiple directions
to get them all to stand up remember i'm trying to harvest these seed heads
and reduce the impact of the reseeding of this grass weed. So you can see now with a couple of
directions that these heads are now standing proud and i'm now going to put the cylinder in and i'm
going to mow down nice and close and see if i can harvest these seed heads and get them off my lawn.
So after we've mowed now at a height which was aimed to try and capture as many of these
seed heads as possible but approximately the same height as the as the grass has been cut previously
i am able then to go into this grass box to demonstrate that we are actually
clipping off these little seed heads that that we're now standing more upright because of the
the verticutting action so that's encouraging i'm going to make sure i dispose of those and
they get taken away from the site because i never want to see them again.
We wanted to make sure that these sample tubs were treated in exactly the same way as a lawn
would be treated so we've just rigged up this extremely crude framework here so that we're at
ground level at the top here and i'm i'm able to run the mower across the tops of the grass
and make sure that's right. We can do individual height to cut changes if we need to some of these
we are able to mow lower than others and we might get quite different results so
we'll see what happens but you just take a look at what it is that we're doing with this.
So thanks for joining us for episode five just to recap the learning so far eight weeks into our
new seed project early germination and getting an established sward is so important for making sure
that the grass weeds that we don't want are in a high compete situation and don't get started.
When the grass weeds inevitably come in you can either hand pick those for a small lawn for a
bigger lawn we're going to be working on a program now of verti-cutting and mowing. At eight weeks
we've started to cylinder mow in order to start to develop the sward and make it thicker and get the
lawn stripes of course that we really want to get. We're going to be verti-cutting weekly standing
the grass plants upright especially for the annual meadow grass where we want to be making sure that
we harvest with the grass box on and clipping off those annual meadowgrass seeds in order to break
this cycle of new seeded heads which will come and germinate for next year. The verticut also
works well on the yorkshire fog those broader leaf weeds because they just don't like the traffic we
can cut the leaves off as well we can stand them upright we can cut them off with the verticut too.
So now we're just going to be mowing we're going to be verticutting
keeping this lawn under control letting it develop and thicken up we're going to be using
good regular fertilizer application as well so that we can get a really good established lawn
in this first year. Thanks ever so much for joining us we'll see you again soon