Hello I'm Austin Jarrett from Allett Mowers today we just want to shoot a really quick video on how
you might thicken up your lawn. So there are lawns just like this we've overseeded this recently and
this lawn area here just really hasn't taken very well and i want a nice thick lush lawn that mows
really well and really shows up light green dark green stripes. Now the grass i might have might
be really poor it might be a really old lawn but by over-seeding this and introducing new cultivars
we're going to be using a 100% ryegrass which stripes really well and it really establishes
and germinates to a high percentage. So the method that we're going to use is not going to involve
loads of really expensive equipment but it's going to involve using what's in these bags here as the
growing medium and that's compost. This compost has been bought from a supermarket at three pounds
a bag and there's 50 litres in a bag. We've been doing some experiments as part of another trial
that we're doing more generally about seeds and you can catch up with that the links below
and we've been growing the grass in tubs as first part of the experiment and we were testing out
the different cultivars but what we also did was sew the seed on top of the soil from this garden
and then we topped we put the seed on and then we topped it off with three different mediums
and what i've got here is on the top of this box here is we used over the top of the seed compost
and on this section here we used a sand soil mix predominantly sand 70 percent sand
and 30 percent soil and then on this third of the box we just used the same soil that we used in the
base from the garden and we were really surprised. It was very definitely when the grass plants start
to emerge it was coming out of where the compost was used and then as that's carried on because the
grass plants have had a head start it's thicker already and this was literally sewn three weeks
ago so we're starting to get a really great lawn going and so we were convinced that using
compost as a topping over the top of the seed was going to give us a much better result. Then
I'll show you something else that we did as part of that development of this technique.
So the second part of the trial was we seeded this area i levelled it first using the sand
and soil mixture using a lute and then once i'd done that i then mixed the seed with the
compost at the seed rate i wanted and covered the whole area but i did something slightly different
with this strip here which you can see is the width of the compost spreader. I then filled
the compost spreader up with just compost and i deposited another covering of compost over
the compost and seed mix that i put down to start off with and we were really surprised to see and
you can still see very significantly this is two weeks after seeding that what we've got is a see
an establishment rate although still a little bit patchy because it's still quite young we've got an
establishment rate here that is much higher than the adjacent runs which just had seed and compost
you can see even now that there's still seed on the surface here as the compost has broken down
but here there's much less seed and there's much more grass so that's the method that we're going
to use on our little trial over just across the way of from the drive. So what we're going to do
is we're going to use this compost spreader which is a really nice spreader i put the compost inside
there and then when i run that over the ground it spreads out a reasonably even amount of compost.
What i'm also going to do before i put the compost in there is i'm going to put the compost in the
wheelbarrow and mix the grass seed up. I've already worked out that this area here is about
50 square meters i'm going to be using an ideal over-seeding rate of about 50 grams per metre so
i'm going to need about 250 grams of grass seed in order to sew this area which i'll mix in with the
top dressing i'll then distribute it and once i've done all of that i'm then going to use just plain
compost material and i'm going to go over the top of that again. What i did before i started was
i've irrigated this really well so the ground is now really moist because i didn't want any
deficit in moisture to occur when i topped it off then with the compost. So let's get on with it.
So that's the first stage done the compost and the seed mix is now spread around. Now one of
the things i found with the compost spreader you have these areas of steel and not mesh and it does
leave these strips here where there's no compost and therefore no seed so the other thing i just
quickly want to do now is to use my trusty lawn lute and of course every real man has one of these
in his shed a fantastic lawn tool used for so many different things but what i want to do is to just
make sure now that i've got a full distribution and i'm not just left with those little
strips there because that's important that i've got an even distribution of the seed.
The other reason i like the compost is that in the trials that we've done there's been absolutely no
weed seeds whatsoever i've had no weeds come up in the in the trial plots so as part of
that composting process it must kill off the weed seeds because there's just no evidence that and
that's the other thing of course i don't want to be introducing any weed seeds which if i use
topsoil that is a big risk. I want to keep this this this ryegrass lawn 100 percent ryegrass if i
possibly can with no ingress of weeds whatsoever. I don't know why the compost has worked so well
on the seeds that we've done whether it's because during the colder period
in april of this year the darker colour absorbed more heat or whether it's the nutrients
i actually don't really mind too much all i want to do is to get a good lawn
so let's get this luted out and get this seed spread around evenly.
So now the grass seed and the compost is spread evenly after the looting
we've now filled the compost spreader with just compost so that we can now give the
mixture a coating of just compost over the top which is what we found to be so successful.
So that's it the second coating of the compost is now done
and actually of course the grass plants are still showing through so it doesn't
look any worse now actually than it did before we started so nobody's going to complain about
you trashing the lawn while you're trying to make this improvement and make a much more dense sward.
We've used three bags to cover the 50 metres to give two coverings and when i've calibrated it
in order to work out the seed rate then one bag of 50 litres covers about 30 metress once so if
you want to do a calculation not only for your seed application rate each mixture that you need
to do for a bag is 30 metres covered therefore how much grass seed do i need to put in there
to get the application rate that i want but that gives you a rough idea as well to work out whether
what the cost is going to be to do your lawn as well. You can buy compost really inexpensively
from little supermarkets and Tesco's and elsewhere rather than probably going to a
garden centre where they probably charge in the region of twice that price. So i'll see you again
in a few weeks time and we'll see what this looks like then. So here we are with an Allett time warp
and we're now four weeks ahead from when we did the compost over-seeding method on this area here
and i think you can see that the results here are quite satisfactory some areas it's not quite as
thick as i wanted but this is quite a different lawn area than it was just a few weeks ago so i
think that's really important. We'll just go and have a look at the other area that i showed where
we originally established the method as well and we can see what's happened there. This has had
its first cylinder mow today and you can still see that the system where we use the seed and
compost mixture topped off has actually been so much more successful where we just used the seed
and compost mixture on its own without the topping that's continued to be more of a challenge. So i
think this is a really nice method you can use the compost to help you spread the seed evenly
and to also to give it an environment where it's much more likely to thrive especially
when you put that topping over the top and make sure that all the seed is properly covered.
So i hope that's been useful and please if you've got any comments please just put them below you.