Hello I'm Austin Jarrett from Allett Mowers we wanted to shoot a video today that was slightly
different and in fact I'm going to guarantee to you that i'm not going to talk to you about
Allett Mowers but what I am going to talk to you about is the Allett lawn. So you've seen our
videos of this normally quite beautiful lawn but we decided this year that we wanted to up our game
so you will see the Allett lawn is dead and we have sprayed off the lawn including all the weeds
and all the grasses that we had and now what we're doing is we're going to over-seed the whole lawn
with this over seeder and we're going to by over sowing it with the grass seed we will see
new grass come up and hopefully it will be exactly the mixture that we've sowed without any weeds.
We're doing this for several reasons; one we'd like to get a better lawn and and take
you through that journey and see how we get on. We're certainly not experts in over-seeding so
we're going to be learning quite a bit while we go along we'd like you to share in that journey
but also we are really interested in seeds and mixtures because it does affect the mowing quality
and it does affect the quality of the lawn and different seed varieties do things differently
like produce different levels of thatch and are drought resistant to different degrees.
So we've actually decided to do an experiment we've marked the Allett lawn into
five 100 square metre sections and we are sewing different seed mixtures into each one of those
areas and then what we're going to do is over the year have a look at how those different grassy
mixtures respond to mowing, fertilising, how well they stripe, how disease resistant they
are. We get quite a bit of disease on this lawn and we'll see the resistance there too.
So we hope that you're going to enjoy this journey when we're talking about just grass and we're not
talking about lawn mowers. This overseeder is quite an old machine and you will see
how this power cuts slots into the soil about an inch and a half apart and then drops the seed in.
We can adjust it we're aiming to drop the seed in about half an inch deep we're doing it in
two directions we've already cut the slots in this direction and dropped seed in and
we're now cutting it in this direction in order to get the grass growth so it knits up really quickly
and early on because we've got videos to shoot. This is the last day in April and April in the UK
has been quite extraordinary. We've barely had a single April shower like we would normally expect
it has been really cold I think the coldest on record certainly last night parts of the UK have
minus four degrees centigrade frost overnight so we're really late in getting this seeding
done and there's always risk in doing spring seedings anyway because now we've got to keep
this lawn really damp for at least the next two to three weeks to make sure that the germination
happens and the plants stand the chance of growing before they get roots into the soil.
So what are we hoping to gain from this obviously we'd like to get a much higher quality Allett lawn
as well and I have all the different grass varieties as well which will really help us
with testing different cutting systems but what we really are hoping to learn from this
is that this grass seed every single one of these little seeds in my opinion is a miracle of nature
and what they're able to do and the genetics that each one of these hold is really quite amazing.
But what we've also found when we've come to choosing the grass seed for this lawn
is that we with respect to the grass seed manufacturers who know an awful lot about
grass seed when they come to market it they will show you a picture of a sack full of grass seed
and a footballer doing a sliding tackle on emerald green grass
and that isn't really enough information for me now as a lawn enthusiast.
I really want to understand more about what i'm going to get from that particular variety and that
particular mixture of grass. So you can talk to me as a grass enthusiast but i'm no means a biologist
at all then what am i going to get when i choose fescues or bents or ryegrass? What do
i actually get what does that actually mean for me and the amazing lawn that i want to grow. So
by selecting these six different mixtures that we are sewing with all the different varieties
of grass seeds that we can actually choose then i'm hoping that we're going to find actually
the answers to the questions of which grass seed establishes the best, which one looks the best,
if i want a fine leaf lawn or a broadleaf lawn, if i want to lawn that beyond everything else
actually just gives me amazing stripes when i use my Allett lawn mower . I'm sorry i promised
i wasn't going to talk about Allett lawnmowers but what is going to give me the best possible stripe
in summer, in winter, which is going to be the most drought tolerant which is going to be the
most disease tolerant? Now we all want to achieve different things from our lawns
and i'm sure that if we made a list of number one priority all of our priorities would be different.
So what we hope to achieve by having these different seed mixtures is we will be able to
tell you what that lawn looks like close up and the results that it gives us and how easy that
lawn is to look after because actually we might not have the time to be able to go for the amazing
grass type that we really wanted because it just takes too much to look after but we could maybe go
for another one that stripes up equally as well and doesn't take quite as much looking after.
So I hope over the next few months as this brownness turns into green that you can join
me on this journey and we can see what these different grass mixtures are going to give us