Summer Care For Your Lawn

Summer brings it’s own rewards in terms of your garden and your lawn but it also brings with it it’s own fair share of hard work for the gardener. As with the other seasons of the year, your lawn will require attention and maintenance throughout the summer period, especially if it is being used a lot and attracting its own fair share of wear and tear.

The following are a list of the jobs a gardener should be carrying out throughout the summer to maintain the lawn’s visual appearance as well as keeping it healthy and disease free.

Aeration & Scarification

In the summer months of June, July and August your lawn may become subject to a lot of human traffic or even animal traffic, such as domestic pets. The family dog is a prime candidate for causing problems with your lawn as they like to scratch and dig around and roll on the grass in the hot weather.

Aerating and scarifying your lawn in these periods is a good way to help reduce wear and tear on the lawn and also to ensure that nutrients from the soil are being allowed to reach the grass, so it can have a continual supply of food as well as assisting with drainage.

Fertilising

In the early months of the summer season you should feed patchy areas of grass with a lawn fertiliser that is going to help bring these areas of grass back to full growth and health again. You can buy fertilisers that are mixed with weed killers; these weed killers posing no threat to the grass but obviously helping reduce the risk of weeds returning; especially if the patchy grass is in an area where weeds were prominent previously.

Mowing

In the summer, as we all know, the grass grows considerably faster than it would at any other time of the year. This is due in no small part to the combination of longer hours of daylight and periodical showers, which fuel the lawn’s sudden upturn in growing. It is recommended that, given the size and length of your lawn, you should mow it from upwards of once to three times a week, setting the blades higher in drier spells.

Watering

Some might say that in traditional British summers the need to water the lawn is less than it might be but given that over the last few years the summers in the United Kingdom have become hotter, we are faced with increasingly longer dry spells. Watering your garden thoroughly in these dry spells is important as it not only keeps the grass and soil nourished but also reduces the risk of the grass drying out and turning brown as it can burn if not watered often enough.

Weeds & Moss Control

It isn’t only the grass of your lawn that thrives in the summer months, weeds and moss can take a firm hold as well and the best way to treat this problem during this time is to spot-treat them with weed killer. You can of course dig the weeds out by hand thus ensuring that the root of the weed is removed also.

When it comes to removing moss you can wait until it turns black signifying it has died and then rake the lawn, thus removing the moss from the grass with the minimum amount of effort and also the minimum amount of damage to the grass it leaves behind.

Additional Tasks

As the lawn grows in the summer months the grass at the edge of the lawn will overgrow into any borders you might have. Using a half moon edger of a spade and a plank as a measuring guide, re-trim the edges so that the lawn looks not only level but also has a shape that defines it from the rest of your garden.

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