Hi I'm Austin Jarrett and this is Episode 2 of our lawn renovation adventure which we
really want to share with you. Let's start with why we were dissatisfied with our Allett lawn.
To start with we had quite a lot of weed grasses, POA annual and Yorkshire fog and
all of the types of mismatches of seeds which i don't think is unusual in the lawn
we all know how difficult it is to keep those weed grasses at bay.
It was also then very difficult to match repairs whether it be dog pee patches or killing weeds and
then replacing it with a seed mixture because we didn't really know what we'd got we didn't know
what to patch up with so even when we did patch up then again it didn't match up with the rest
of the lawn and we felt we we could make a bit more effort in that. We've also got another quite
large lawn that we don't normally use for videos that is very old I'm guessing it's 100 years old
and is extremely thatchy and the grass varieties in there are are just awful so we again wanted to
bring that lawn in to give just to give us a wider range of choices on where we shoot our videos.
So this is the really old lawn so this house is is quite some age and there has been a lawn here
for quite some time. This house was renovated in 1888 so the lawn could easily have been here in
that time sort of 130 years old and it is really thatchy, really really thatchy and it has really
never had good grass growth on it. We had the choice of actually stripping this off which
is probably what we should have done but what we did do was as i said for all the reasons of speed
we've over-seeded this and the seed is actually sitting in the thatch we did this first and
the results so far are looking sort of patchy. This is a four cultivar ryegrass
mix in here so we would expect to get very early germination but we we sewed this at the end of
march and it was really cold and we were still having frosts weeks later. But in terms of the
thatch layer that we've got here if I just take a sample out of here- the thatch layer itself is
getting on for an inch deep or more sort of looking at this sort of level of thatch and
so the seeding at half an inch is sitting in the thatch. When it's been dry of course the
thatch dries right out and when it rains the thatch sits really wet and a lot of the time
it's like having that blanket over the soil and stopping the soil from actually getting
wet and getting the benefit of the rain or it's keeping it dry as it protects it from the rain.
Whichever way you can see the slits in here not a tremendous amount of growth
out of this but let's see how this goes and let's call it part of the experiment.
So some of the lawns are a bit lumpy some of them a bit thatchy some of them we've got moss
so and particularly on the old lawn where the grass plants have got no vigour in
them whatsoever we felt that by doing a renovation we could put all of that right.
So why are we creating this entire season of videos?
We thought you would enjoy the trial that we're doing. To be absolutely clear this is not an
authoritative how to renovate your lawn but it it is how we are renovating our lawn and i'm
hoping that we will learn from as you always do in these things learn from some successes
and also learn from some failures as well. So we are a lawnmower manufacturer and
we know that different types of grass varieties make a difference to the mowing they really do and
make a difference to the lawn so we were really wanting to during this renovation try and have
a look at the lots of different varieties of grasses that are available to us in our
our English cool season climate. We also wanted to have a look as well once the grass was established
at how our verticuts and scarifiers worked within these different types of grasses some produce more
thatch some of them tend to grow in a more clumpy type of style so they need thinning out as well
to make sure that we end up with a level and even lawn and make that look really attractive. So
who knows we could be developing product range from the learning that we get going here
but in particular the advice that we give on how the cartridges might be used
might also be updated from the learning that we get from this.
At Allett we say one of our statements is that when you buy an Allett you're buying more than
just a mower so i'm hoping that we will be able to give better advice having gone through this
lawn renovation journey as well and a lot of our customers buy a cylinder mower because they want
to up their game on their lawn and of course then they get bitten by the bug like we do and they
want to know more they want to know more about levelling and over-seeding and renovation. So
i have an apology for our international customers those that are in warm season grasses we are
cool season and that's all we can grow on this lawn but i wonder whether if we were to get a lot
of interest from subscribers for this season that maybe some of our keen customers might like to do
a similar experiment in warm season grasses that would be really great and if you're interested
please just put a comment below and we'll get in contact with you because
that would be really useful to so many of our other customers about how to use our products.
The biggest reason that we're doing this though is that when we came to
make some choices about what sort of lawn seed should we use for our renovation
and i've mentioned this before the biggest reason is is the seed guys are really brilliant at what
they do and they're really expert at what they grow and the seeds that they produce
it's absolutely amazing but what I do really have to say is when we came to choose the seed mixtures
we see photographs of bags of seed and we see sliding footballers on lovely green grass but
actually it really doesn't tell us an awful lot and they do have an awful lot of data available
but I have to say it just didn't really mean anything to me because i'm not a groundsman and
i'm not a biologist and i i don't really probably understand the terminology that they're using.
What i do understand though is a close-up photograph of the different mixtures with a
hand brush through it and then see the thatch and then get an understanding of how much work needs
to go into each one of these swards. If i can see what a good colour means when it's stood next to
five other varieties then it gives me a really good comparator when they start talking about
fast growing, early establishment, good colour, great winter performance then when i see them
comparatively that i'm hoping that we'll be able to share that so that you too understand what it
is the seed manufacturers are actually saying to us when they use those descriptions. So this
is a great opportunity to for us to try out and compare to use our Allett lawn and also see the
results that we get and it's for our soil and for our climate so the results that i'm going to
give are going to be actually opinions and they're also going to be based on the experience i've had
in this year with this soil type and the weather that was thrown at us so it it really is not going
to be highly authoritative but i'm hoping that we're all going to be able to get some learning
out of this and then we'll see how these mixtures compare with the descriptions in the brochures.
So let me talk you through what we've done with the Allett lawn just so that you understand the
process so far. So we are two weeks now since we seeded this grass and you can see that it's
starting to come through quite nicely. So the process was back at the end of March we it was
really cold and actually April ended up being a really dry month as well unusually dry so what
we did was the first thing was to get a cylinder mower drop it down as low as we possibly could
and we scalped off as much of the green grass as we possibly could just to reduce the amount of
organic matter that there was on the surface that we were going to be working with. So after giving
the lawn a really close scalp the next stage was to kill off everything that we had. We had so many
weeds we didn't know what we had so we wanted to start with a blank canvas so we used a product
with glyphosate in it and glyphosate kills all the leaves and the roots right down to the bottom
so that 100% killed off the lawn. We waited a period of time and we did that for two reasons;
one i wasn't quite sure how good and effective the spraying was going to be and it takes a while
for the the grass to go yellow to see whether you've got any misses so actually as it turned
out we didn't get any misses but we weren't highly confident with our spraying skills at
that stage. If you're not confident with chemicals and glyphosate in the UK can be used by consumers
and as a household chemical and in some countries i know that is much more difficult and the laws
are changing about the use of glyphosate but you can get a contractor in still to use glyphosate
in a professional capacity i think if you're not allowed to buy it yourself as a as a homeowner.
But it guarantees 100 percent kill on contact and it kills right the way down to the roots.
The other thing that glyphosate doesn't do is it doesn't kill seeds or have an effect on seeds
at all but it does kill right down to the roots. After we left that for a couple of weeks we then
with all the dead material we just used actually an Allett Mower with the scarifier cartridge in it
to lift and remove a bit more of the organic matter as well and if where possible to expose
some soil so we can get the seed really into the soil. We took the opportunity i've got
a few hollows and humps and bumps in this lawn so it was a great opportunity at that time while the
lawn was scraped really low that actually we could use soil and sand mixture and the loot and fill in
some of those holes. Some of them were just where the lawn had settled over time and in other places
it was where paths had been removed and again the infill had settled down and i wanted to get that
levelled up. There's nothing that quite looks like a perfect levelled lawn. Once the levelling of
the lawn had been done and we'd filled in the low spots we then chose a method of over-seeding into
the dead sward that we had and we did that instead of cultivating the whole surface and then seeding
into probably what would have been a better seed bed but the reasons we chose the over-seeding was
we had a limited amount of time to get this job done and we've got over 800 square metres of not
just one big expanse to get done and we felt the over-seeding was going to be a quicker method
to work with. Also when you start to cultivate you can also start to fluff up the soil and then it
all settles back down again all uneven whereas at least if we're sewing into a solid and time-served
sward that everything's pretty much settled to a level and isn't going to start moving around.
When you start to do cultivations as well of course you're lifting and churning up the top
of the surface and that does expose seeds that have been dormant below the surface
we just killed everything off the seeds are untouched by glyphosate and then we'd end up
with some re-germination which would have taken some time or if we just seeded the weeds would
have been in the sward and that was something that we were really keen not to have happen.
The other thing was if we'd cultivated these the soil surface and created a seed bed though
we were concerned that if it did go dry and we needed to start to do a lot of irrigation
during that critical period of germination that we'd get a lot of wash off and that seed would
redistribute itself as it floated with the with the water and we were we were worried about how
actually we were going to manage that whereas when we were over-seeding into even though it's
a dead sward then we weren't going to be getting that soil and seed movement to the same extent.
We chose to use a serious over-seeder a ryan mataway overseeder it's really a professional
machine they they generally cost thousands of pound. I have to say we picked one up in the
winter season when machinery tends to be a little bit cheaper and we bought a really old machine
probably 25 years old plus which was in fair condition we changed all the belts on it ready for
this exercise and we paid about 1600 pounds for it we'll probably sell it on again after the
after this experiment is finished but you can hire these machines the mattaway is exceptionally good
robust solid machine it will jump over roots and it will keep a very consistent depth because it's
quite heavy. If you've got a small garden though i have to say that without wanting to sound sexist
this is a real man's machine you really have to maul this machine around your garden
and you really have to want to do it and you'll see that in the video shots we're showing you now.
So the machine can be hired really quite easily and you can if you really want to know who you can
hire it from we can give you some names just to put ask the question down in the comments below.
We could have done a lighter scarification distributed seed but we chose not to do that
because we really just wanted to get this job done once and get it done properly.
You can see we've used the over-seeder here we we seeded all of the seed mixtures at 40 to 50
grams per square metre and they were all sewn between half an inch three quarters of an inch
deep 12 millimetres to 19 millimetres deep.
We're starting to get the results now we're two weeks on and already the ryegrass trial plots are
starting to look significantly further ahead than the fescue bent plots are as you would expect
right at the beginning and that doesn't mean that the germination percentage is better it just
means that it's earlier at this stage so we're getting these something looking like green again.
This is the seeder that we used very heavy duty machine and it relies on cutting slots into the
ground two inches apart and you can adjust the depth. It then uses discs to open up the slot
and then metre the seed from the seeding from the seed hopper here and it feeds them down the tubes
into the side of the disk and that drops then down into the slot that we cut with the blades
at the front end and if I tip this machine up you can actually see what's happening underneath.
This is the rotating blade they rotate in this direction to keep a nice clean empty slot and then
these are the discs which aren't driven that just open up the slot and the seed is dispensed from
the tube just down the side of the disc and into the slot. That's closed up again when you tread on
that slot and that gives good seed to soil contact and you can see this whole lawn is just covered in
lines of seed where the maximum germination is always happening where the slot was cut.
We've also done another small trial that on a small patch with the fine turf
one quality and we've done that in a slightly different way it's just a small plot and i
was really interested to try compost as a seed covering on just a straightforward broadcast.
We did broadcasting of seed on the surface and covering with compost using a compost spreader
and we also mixed the grass seed with the compost and used that as a spreader
as well and we thought that might just be a an unusual trial just to see whether that is
actually a valid method of over-seeding. By giving that seed the covering with the compost we think
really increases the chances of greater levels of germination and probably reduces the amount
of bird damage that we get as well so we've just tried that as well let and we'll have a look at
that in a few weeks time to see how successful that's been.Meanwhile thanks ever so much
hope that you're going to watch episode three where we look at the seed trial in the tubs
and understand a little bit better what the six different seed mixtures are that we're using.