What about you!
Today we're going to cover the basics of getting your Autumn lawn renovation done properly.
I'm going to be scarifying, aerating, feeding, and putting on seaweed. Let's go .....
Because we're doing beginner level tips, I'm going to shake things up a bit. I'm going to do the scarifying,
I'm going to say that before I did this last night I cut the lawn and it doesn't need cut now. If you're going to be doing this type of thing, you would cut your lawn beforehand. For
the beginners out there who don't know what scarification is, it's a method, you have your
normal lawnmower where the blades go round and round and round. With a scarifyer your blades go
pull into the lawn, and I'm going to show you that. Come on, we'll have a look underneath the scarifyer
just to see the blades. So your normal rotary lawnmower will have blades going round and round
whereas this has blades that that actually cut in, so they spin around and they cut into the turf.
I've done a bit of scarifying, just to see what height the scarifyer is at. We get a lot of
questions about what height you should set your scarifyer at. I'd always say set at the
higher height, and then you can bring it down. We haven't brought that much out of the lawn
here, but I'm going to carry on and do a bit more, and then we'll probably lower it after that, but
I just want to test to make sure, I don't want to take too much out and damage the lawn.
I've done a line, and I'm not that happy with the height, so we're going to lower
the blades down into the lawn to take more out.
We still haven't reduced it enough, so now I'm going to put it down a bit more. What
we ideally want to do, is just to flick the grass out and if you have any moss just pull it out too.
I've seen some "Daddy Long Legs ", stroke Crane Flies
flying about this general area. Daddy Long Legs, what happens, in October they plant their eggs
in the lawn and those eggs turn into leather jackets, and they kill your lawn. Now your lawn can
support a certain number of them so I'm not going to be too worried about them just at the minute, a
warning sign - if you have a lot of Daddy Long Legs on a building or close by on different surfaces,
then there's a good chance that your lawn's going to be affected. Now, when this is, is August
September and early October. The Daddy Long Leg stroke Crane Fly, that's whenever they hatch, and they
fly up, and then come October time to plant their eggs and over October those eggs turn into larvae.
That is the time you want to treat, towards the end of October. Now you can use nematodes, and there's
also chemical control on the market, but you need to be a professional to apply it. Let's get back to scarifying.
That's the lawn now scarifyed. Today I'm just doing the one pass if it was your own garden then chances
are you'd be doing at least two passes. One of the reasons for that is whenever we have
a look at the stuff that we pulled out, you can still see that there's quite a bit of sand
down in the lawn from whenever we top dressed. I would ideally like to do some
seeding, but I'm going to hold off until later in the month, and we'll probably do
another light scarify, plus we'll do some seeding and some top dressing.
Now there's a range of tools that you can use to clear the waste off your lawn, today I'm going
to be using the lawnmower as the waste isn't that heavy. A small blower can be really really useful
as well for clearing up waste. You could also use a tool like this here, which is a landscaping rake,
I'll leave a Link down below where you can buy one of these, you'll see these a lot in my Videos .
You can see that there's not that much to come out of this lawn. Now I'm just going
to get the battery lawnmower out and we're going to run over it to lift any remaining debris.
Welcome back. I'm going to let yous into a bit of a secret here. I'll give you a behind the scenes.
I actually hurt my back filming the first portion of this Video, so I've brought Jason down and he's
going to give us a hand to get the Video finished off, but first I'm going to talk you through some
different things to do with aeration, so come on over here for a look. A few years ago we did a
Video on how to aerate your lawn with cheap tools, such as a fork or a drill. This is probably not
going to be that practical for most gardens, you can use a fork, however with all the dry weather
we've been having the last week you're probably not going to be using any of these tools and
you're going to be looking at something more like an aerator, and that's what we're going to use today.
You can of course, use a fork if you want to aerate, or any other tool. However currently
filming this in a heat wave, but later on in the month or end of October or through the winter
or in early spring, you can use a fork and it's going to be a lot easier to get it down into
the ground. Just as the ground's so hard at the moment that hiring an aerator is probably
your best bet. You can hire an aerator for bewtween 50 and 150 pounds for a day.
Our next step is now to get the cores lifted off the lawn. I know a lot of people will be
saying, "Robbie, what's better solid tine aeration or or hollow core aeration ?" What I would say to you
is, generally I prefer hollow core aeration. However don't get too hung up on it if
you can only get solid tine aeration, do that. That's going to be better than no aeration.
And our next job is now to get these cores lifted off the lawn.
You can leave them lying on the lawn, however I'm going to explain the way I don't like doing that now.
Some people advocate leaving these lying on the garden, and for a lot of gardens that's fine, but
if you're on clay soils I would say don't leave them, or I'd always lift them because it looks
untidy. Having the cores lying all over the lawn for them to break down naturally, then it
allows their microorganisms to get back down into the soil, however it does look unsightly, and the
thing is as well you risk damaging your lawnmower or blocking your blade whenever you go out to cut
your grass, for the first and second time, you might end up leaving little mounds all over your lawn,
uneven surface. Look there's lots of downsides to leaving these lying, you're also - I'd always
clear them up afterwards and that's what I'm going to show you now, how to clear these up the best way.
Jason's got a couple of rakes here to try out , we've got a spring tine
rake, and we've got a plastic one. So this is going to be the most obvious
thing that a lot of you guys will be trying to tidy up the cores with.
So our first method here is the spring tine rake. We're also getting another bit of light scarifying!.
Now, it's doing a, not a bad job at lifting the cores, but it's
going to be quite slow to do this entire garden.
So you can see just the difference in speed between the plastic rake and the spring tine
rake we were using a minute ago. If your method of getting the cores up is going to
be a rake I would recommend a plastic rake, as it glides over the grass a lot easier than the
solid tine one, whereas this digs into the grass, as you saw it was pulling out thatch.
Next up, we'll try the big blower.
How quick is that! But is it the quickest?
Now to try the brush sweeper.
Just finished up using the brush sweeper there.
It was a lot quicker, although when I first started I had iton the the high speed mode, which
I thought was a bit hard to use. Put it onto the lower speed and it was a lot
handier to use. Still a bit of a hard work compared to the blower, but a lot quicker.
The final part of the clearup is to get these cores lifted up and onto the compost heap.
Now don't be tempted to use this stuff for leveling your lawn, as it rots down. If you
want to learn how to take your lumps and bumps out of your lawn - watch this Video next.