Hi and welcome again to Garden Ninja today I'm going to be showing you how to
scarify a lawn. By scarifying your lawn you can keep it in tip-top condition and keep it looking
vibrant green all year round. It just takes a little bit of effort spring and autumn
to end up with the turf of your dreams so before we jump straight in and start scarifying
the lawn, we need to prepare it. What we need to do is to go around and remove any perennial weeds
that we can see see so perennial weeds are things like Dandelions
that basically isn't grass and a good way to get rid of it is a weed remover
this small tool usually costs about one or two pounds is brilliant you can get it
straight in under the root basically pop out the weeds so what we're going to do
is to go all around the lawn and
find as many of these weeds we can and dig them out because if we don't what the scarifier will do is then
cut up all those perennial roots and distribute them everywhere in the
meaning that next year you're probably going to end up with more weeds than you
started off with
So you're going to need to a few key bits of equipment to be able to scarify a lawn, you're going to need
a lawn mower to cut the grass to a really short level obviously going to need a scarifier
now this is an electric scarifier you can do it by hand with a rake but its really hard work so
I always use an electric one, you're then going to need some high quality grass seed
for after wards which you can then overseed the lawn with
last but not least a bucket of assorted tools for things like removing weeds cutting out any grass
thats crept into paths and doing any
maintenance along the way and i'm going to show you know exactly what's in electric scarifier
is what it does and why it's different to using a rake. Here we have the
electric scarifier it looks a little bit like a lawn mower
when you turn it over onto its side don't worry its unplugged so I'm not going to get
my fingers cut off! You can see in here we've got this selection of steel blades what they do is
they spin when they make contact with the turf they then claw and cut the top layer
of the turf. What that does is it pulls out all of tatch and also severs the grass which
causes new growth so it's kind of multi-action. It removes thatch and dead grass
moss, debris stuff that is sort of suffocating the lawn and then secondly slices
through the lawn which kind of puts the lawn in state of panic and then we'll send out
new shoots new, growth, and look a lot fuller when its recovered
it's quite brutal and and once people scarified they often think factor 'Gosh my lawn
looks awful' all it's the best thing you can do to keep your lawn
in Grade A pristine condition. What I'm going to do with my electric mower is
now mow the entire lawn. We're going to mow it for a really close cut
as close to the ground
as I can get it, but some people have is a scalping and it's not scalping, scalping
is when its
it's so low that it cuts the turf up we're going to get its close we can
and what that will mean is when we scarify there's less sort of waving grass
knocking around under that scarifier that's likely to get ripped out so it's really
short
scarifier has less work to do it doesn't damage the grass too much.
Lets get cracking!
ok so I've cut all the grass and now ready to scarify, and when you scarify
it's pretty much like using a lawn mower but in this instance we're going to be going up and down one way
just like a lawn mower but then on the second pass we're going to be going 90
degrees to those stripes. So you're always going one wayand then another you can take it a step further
and go at a 45 degree angle you really want to do a hard scarify however this
lawn has been scarified every year so shouldn't need too deep a setting too or too much
scarification but it was still bring out all that fresh new growth now I will warn you
it's going to look pretty brutal you look at this thinking 'Garden Ninja what have you done?'
But in six weeks time when the new shoots come up you should see the fruits of your hard work
and your lawn will be pristine ready for next season!
Now I've just switched off the scarifier and I've only done a few passes just to show you the amount
of stuff that comes off the lawn you can see a load of dead grass, moss all sorts of other debris thats on the lawn
that's off two passes so I've literally been scarifying for 30 seconds loads to come out and its going to look brilliant when its done
So I've finished in two different directions now with the scarifier and its pulled up probably
a full wheelie bin of moss and dead grass
whats known as thatch, the debris and crud thats pushed down every time you mow the grass so
it looks awful but it is going to come back i'm going to do now use the lawn mower one last
time to mow the lawn regularly as you would do normally to pull up anything else
thats on the surface to trim it back so it's as flush as it can be, then we will move onto over seeding
Now that I've finished scarifying the lawn I'm going to finish it off by over seeding
help bring some new growth to the lawn with new seeds so what I'm going to do
is split my lawn seed into two buckets do one pass with one bucket and we'll go the
other way with the other to make sure it's evenly distributed, give it a good water and
then leave it
So there we have it Garden Ninjas guide to 'How to scarify a a lawn' and I can guarantee that by
spring you're lawn is going to be the talk of the road! If you like this video why not subscribe to me on
YouTube or watch some of my other garden tips Alternatively you can visit
gardenninja.co.uk to read my blog articles as well thanks for watching happy gardening!