Hi I'm Will Cooper I'm Head Groundsman at a private estate in Oxford. I got into lawn care;
I joined the team sort of eight years ago as a gardener effectively and then i've sort of
naturally progressed into lawn care as the time has gone on. I've grown up on a farm and used
used to work on a local farm I think sort of the transition from kit to driving a tractor
and mowing fields to getting onto a sort of kit like this sort of quite a natural transition and
same sort of eye and techniques really so. So I started off working for the farmer who contracts
the land on the estate and then one day had a cup of tea and met the head gardener and
she sort of was quite keen on me joining the team and it ended up that yes she offered me a job and
started working here sort of eight nine years ago really so yeah and it sort of just
progressed from there. I took over i started mowing the croquet lawn originally we had a
ride on atco like with a seat trail behind with a seat on and not long after i started we
purchased another 34 inch cylinder mower and i've sort of learnt on that and then this this turned
up two or three weeks ago and hopefully I will have many many hours on the croquet lawn with this
over the next few years and hopefully get a few more attachments and bits and pieces for it along
the way to help improve the lawn. So not long after I started like I say we sort of purchased a
34-inch cylinder mower and we've gone through the process of just sort of it's never been relayed
just gets top dressed, scarified, top dressed, aerated and overseeded for our autumn renovations
and then it gets top dressed in the in the spring as well just to try and improve the levels that
we've got here but we've never ripped it up and started again in effect like you see a lot of
football pitches do and everyone seems to do nowadays is sort of all natural what was
here and just sort of managed really. We've got some we've got built in irrigation points four
points around the lawn that run off a rain bird irrigation system that gets fed from our arboretum
ponds down on another part of the estate yeah so at the moment we don't need it but
in the summer when it comes dry we've got plenty of water to go on so it does a really nice job of
keeping it in top condition. So some of the challenges we sort of face on this lawn as
you can see there's a lot of trees surrounding i mean even after a cut just then there's a lot of
a lot of debris on the lawn from leaves and bits and pieces surrounding the grass area.
One of the cartridges we've purchased with the with the Allett is the lawn rake
and i've used that over the last sort of 10 days since we've taken delivery of it
just to pick up debris and gently sort of scarify the lawn really and stand it up and
does a really good job of getting the pine needles out and everything else that sort of
falls on it really so yes. Like I say I'm really impressed with the lawn rake scarifying cartridge
and there's a lot of other attachments we can get for the Allett which we'll hopefully purchase
in the future so yeah the verticut cartridge would be beneficial and also a sorrell roller just to
try and get a bit of surface water through the canopy and sort of down into the roots
just because it's a bit of a bald area and we do suffer a little bit after a heavy rainfall with a
sort of a few patches here and end up with a little bit of sitting water
underneath just because like i said before we haven't sort of ripped this up and relayed it so
we're not 100 percent sure sort of on the drainage and what's underneath bits of areas of the lawn
and we can hopefully reduce that with the sorrel roller cartridge through the winter and
autumn months as well. So one of the challenges we face on this lawn is
these few patches of Yorkshire Fog we've got here there are other grass species in there
that we do want so i'm hoping a regular verticut slash light scarify program will just open this up
and give the grass that we want in there a chance to sort of thrive and reduce this yorkshire fog so
hopefully in the next sort of six to eight weeks we'd see some improvement. So another thing i'm
looking forward to using the scarifying cartridge over the winter months we've got sycamores
and the pine needles from the cedar trees and stuff like that and especially in the
autumn with the amount of leaf fall and sort of debris that we have to collect previously we've
done it with a leaf blower which takes quite a lot of time to get it as clean as you want it
and get the debris off the lawn hoping that the scarifying cassette will be coming to it's own
in the autumn on this on this lawn and sort of do a nice job of tidying it up ready for a mow
at the back end of the season. So the croquet lawn is used sort of on a pretty regular basis
really for just sort of private use and we sort of have quite a few guests here in the estate and
everyone sort of seemed to complement it and love coming here to play croquet. So the optimum height
cut I feel is probably around 15 mil for this lawn just because it's not a complete sort of
bowling green that's been relayed there are sort of undulations in the lawn
and also that comes into play a little bit that's why i especially like the scarifying cassette just
because it's a little bit gentler on the on the sort of highs and lows of the lawn and it brings
it up really nice after a scarify. Generally sort of the mower copes really well with going up and
down we've got a bank at the end of the lawn there it's quite a steep gradient and the mower
just seems to go up and down there with ease which doesn't really drain the battery too much either
extra from what i can tell so far from using the mower. So yeah really really pleased with that
and the performance of it like I say up and down a sort of quite quite steep bank really. So yeah
really lucky that the boss went for the Allett we've done quite a lot of research into these
mowers before we made our purchase and had a demo here and also went and looked at it working on
other lawns. The battery power just from sort of ease of use also not having to wear ear defenders,
you could walk walk up and down the lawn and talk to someone if you wanted to it's that
quiet and also if people are here around the house and bits and pieces you sort of
you're not going to be disrupting their area as well by having a droning mower in the background
and also the battery power like not having to get extra fuel and sustainability is a massive thing
especially in this day and age with climate change and everything and i can't see why
this isn't the sort of way forward really. We also purchased a battery-powered hedge cutter
which we've really been really impressed with the last couple of years and really really happy that
we followed suit with this and we'll hopefully get some more battery-powered products in the future.
So a feature i especially like about this mower is the height of cut there
instead of having to get a bar out to adjust the mower and loosen and tighten a nut off just
giving this one turn and you know it's a precision turn and you know you're only moving that one mil
up or down. Another another great feature from this is like if you if you go over the
over the lawn at say 16 mil and you think oh it looks a bit long you've only just got to give that
a full turn and drop the mower height a mill and you know your bang on for the next cut
just to take it down that little bit further so yeah really really pleased with that feature on
the mower. I find another great feature on the mower is these grass blades sort of deflectors to
they fill the box so much more efficiently and evenly so you can get more in the box
rather than feeding it all into the middle of the mower and then it's sort of
coming back over the blades rather quickly and it does fill the box very efficiently
with this feature. So another great feature of the mower i find is the variable speed dial here
generally using the sort of scarifier verticut cartridge
generally walk a little bit slower than what you would with a cylinder but it's so easy just to
increase your speed and decrease your speed even as as you're going along i find that very useful
on this mower. So after using this machine going back to a petrol machine would be a
quite a big step backwards i think like in terms of usage and let's say petrol
and potential spillages on the lawn. The beauty of this is if you run out halfway through
you just go and get your batteries that are on charge and and swap them over and you're not gonna
you know you're not gonna damage the lawn in any way or
cause any sort of like say leakages or have to drag the mower off the lawn to fill it up so
yeah and that in that sense it's a it's a great addition. When you put a machine back after a day
and you turn the engine off you'll be like ahhhhh you don't get that with this it's sort of
this is a nice quiet machine apart from your walking you don't really feel any
vibration through the handles or sort of feel like you've been abused almost like
if you spend a long time on a bit of kit which you can from a from a petrol perspective.
I'd say sort of trial and error obviously you've got to have a little bit of knowledge but trial
and error is quite a big thing of how i learnt how to sort of look after lawns effectively.There's
a lot of information out there on youtube and social media that you can learn from and it's sort
of very informative bits of how to renovate lawns, fertilising and all sort of things lawn care
but one thing i'd say is sort of quite an underestimated thing about lawn care is what
i try and do is take a take a picture at certain stages of the year and record what you've done at
certain times and then at the end of the year you can look back on it and see how you can improve
for next year and then going forward if you do something different and get a get a better result
the following year then you sort of you're then moving forward in the right direction
if you just stand still and say i'm i'm happy with that then your lawn will do the same thing
so yeah just looking at looking at how other people do stuff and trying to take bits of
information from different places and think how i can use them to improve the lawns i look after.