How to maintain your lawn

How to Maintain Your Lawn

In this lesson, we're going to look at lawns and how to keep them as healthy and green as possible in a sustainable way. We do all our lawn work once a year in early October.

A lawn is made up of millions of tiny plants that need air, water and light to grow, and are under constant competition with foot traffic.

To keep a lawn thriving, turf work is an essential autumn task.

• You can also do this in spring, but as with lifting and dividing perennials, doing it in early October gives roots time to grow and settle in before cold winter weather.

The Lawns at Sissinghurst

We have three living elements in this garden:

• herbaceous plants and flowering shrubs that give exuberance
• hedges that provide solidity and define the layout and structural design of the garden
• the pauses for reflection - this is the great, simple thing that an area of grass delivers
• here in the Rose Garden, the lawn makes you pause and look at the different routes you might take out of the central space
• lawns also act as a foil for the planting.

Our Autumn Lawncare Routine

Lawns can be one of the highest maintenance areas of the garden, with potential inputs of fertilisers, irrigation and weedkillers. We don't do any of this and treat our lawn in a completely organic way, including zero irrigation.

This is much more environmentally friendly and sustainable, and our autumn turfwork is what allows it to stay green.

This is our process:

1. scarifying - taking out dead grass that has built up over the year
2. spiking - relieves compaction from walking
3. slitting - opens up the turf and stimulates tillering (breaking up the grass and encouraging it to form new grass shoots from the roots)
4. top-dressing and re-seeding the lawn.

We use machinery for these steps, but it's perfectly possible to use just rakes and garden forks.

• For a large lawn, we'd recommend investing in buying or hiring the machinery.
• For a small lawn, hand tools are absolutely fine.

Scarifying

The dead material that builds up in lawns stops air, water and light from getting to the grass, and creates a springy lawn that isn't resilient to summer drought or use.

• Scarifying removes this dead material ('thatch').

If weeds in your lawn bother you, just dig these out by hand beforehand.

• Scarifying can spread any weeds by chopping it up and distributing the pieces.

You can scarify your lawn by hand by raking it vigorously with a wire rake.

• This gets a lot of the thatch out of the grass. It's hard work - you'll need to do it several times - but it's very effective.

I use a scarifier machine, which is the Eliet E501 model.

Here's how to use a scarifier:

1. as with any noisy machine, it's a good idea to use ear defenders or plugs to help protect your ears
2. walk it up and down like a mower until you've gone over the whole lawn
3. then repeat this at 90 degrees to your first direction
4. if you think you need to do more, you can go over again once or twice more, you're aiming for an open sward as you want open areas that new seed can be brushed into to germinate
5. collect up the thatch.

Removing the Thatch

It took about 10 minutes to scarify this lawn in two directions and lots of dead grass has come out.

Now we need to rake up that thatch and see how dense the lawn is.

• We might need to scarify another once or twice if it still looks too dense.
• Put the thatch on your compost heap.

We use hessian sheets for carrying things around the garden, which is easier than trying to get up steps and round corners with a barrow.

• The hessian looks nice, and the weight of them also means they stay put, unlike plastic tarpaulin sheets.
• We call them 'donkeys' as they're useful for carrying things - and Vita had a garden donkey!
• If you don't have a 'donkey', get one. They're very easy to make as it's just a sheet of hessian around 8ft square that's hemmed round the edges. Just buy a hessian roll, cut it and hem the edges.

How to rake up the thatch:

• I always recommend raking quite hard rather than just flicking the thatch, as this will help to scarify further
• rake the thatch into one line down the middle of the lawn
• lay your hessian sheet down next to the line, rake the thatch onto it and gather up the sheet at the corners to take to the compost.
• after raking up, we mow again to pick up any remaining thatch.

Spiking the Ground

Spiking is the next stage after scarifying. This releases compaction and allows water in to reach the roots.

• You can spike with a fork - aim for holes 6cm deep at 15cm spacing to open up the topsoil.
• You can use a machine for larger areas. You can fit hollow tines (spikes), which go down like a tube and take out cores of soil. I'm using a hired Groundsman elliptical turf aerator hired from Acacia, which hires out equipment in the South East.

How to use a lawn aerator:

1. use ear defenders or earplugs
2. go up and down the same as with the scarifier, but only once this time
3. you can adjust the height on the aerator if you want deeper cores, but often the hole will be deeper, just the whole core hasn't come out.
4. you can check the hole depth with a pen or pencil. I'm happy with 3-5cm deep.

The hollow tine aerator is to aerate the surface layer of the lawn rather than relieving deep compaction, such as that caused by heavy machinery.

• For that purpose, you'd use something like a verticutter.

Slitting

Once you've spiked, you move on to slitting. This cuts the grass and encourages tillering to grow new grass shoots. It also relieves any compaction from the tyres of the 'tiner'.

This step isn't absolutely necessary and isn't really something you can do with a hand tool, but you can easily hire in a slitting machine, as you'll only need to use it once a year at the most.

• The slitter has a different type of action from a scarifier - whereas the scarifier had a raking action, this has a slicing action that creates narrow slits in the topsoil.

How to use a slitter:

1. use ear defenders or earplugs
2. go up and down in rows as before
3. turn lightly to avoid smearing the corners
4. if it picks up grass around the edges where it's turning, you can go over those areas with a mower afterwards.

Top-Dressing

We used to use a 60:40 mixture of sand and loam for top-dressing, but we found this didn't support the soil life, such as insects and worms that help the grass. So now we buy an organic top-dressing.

If we had enough, we would use our own compost, such as Bokashi compost made from anaerobic fermentation.

• This can be ready in 9 weeks or less.
• We add our own green garden waste material, mixed in layers with the Bokashi bran and molasses, sealed over to make the Bokashi system.
• The result is beautiful, fine compost. We use this on the borders, which is why there isn't enough for top-dressing the lawns so there isn't enough or would use it.

We mix some grass seed into the fine, sieved organic top-dressing to fill in the spaces we've opened up by scarifying. You can buy lots of different grass seed, but we use a mixture of:

• dwarf rye grass - resilient to wear from foot traffic
• chewing's fescue
• smooth-stalked meadow grass
• brown topped bent.

How to apply top-dressing:

1. mix a jugful of grass seed in with the organic top-dressing (this gives accuracy and an even spread)
2. pour the mixture into a roller.
3. go up and down in lines again, but we go over each line twice to ensure the seed is distributed evenly
4. within two weeks, you won't see the top-dressing, and the seed should have started germinating. The old sward will also be growing up through now that it's reinvigorated.

If you don't have a roller, you can still mix your top-dressing and grass seed in a barrow and then spread it with a shovel.

• Slinging it in a curving movement gives a surprisingly even distribution.
• The roller just gives more control; it isn't expensive, and there's nothing to go wrong with it like other machines.

A 12m x 12m lawn has taken around an hour and a half for the whole four-step process, but it's a worthwhile investment given it's the only effort we'll put into this lawn in the whole year apart from weekly mowing.

• It's well worth you doing this in autumn, or in spring if you can't do it in autumn

Scaling Up or Down

We use pedestrian mowers and lawn machinery, but you can scale as appropriate:

• if you have a big garden, you can scale it up to tractor-mounted lawn equipment and get contractors in to do it
• on a small scale, you can use a rake to scarify and a fork to aerate.

Being Patient

You don't have to do all of these steps at once or on all your lawns. The key is little and often, and over a period of time.

• If your lawn is wet or mossy and you want to improve it, the thing that makes a difference is to have a programme - this could be very little at once, but scheduled over the years.
• Don't expect to do the process above and all your lawn issues to be resolved by the next week.
• If you can only do one of these steps at a time or over small areas, that's fine.
• Think about your problem areas - e.g. is there a compacted shortcut across the lawn to the washing line? - and start to tackle these little by little over a number of years.
• This way, you'll end up with lawns that can take the wear but also look good over most of the season.

Gardening More in Tune with Nature

We've moved over to lots of meadow areas at Sissinghurst where we previously had lawns.

• This has been great for wildlife - we did a biodiversity baseline audit this year and found over 900 species sharing the garden with us.

However, there are areas that still require more traditional lawn to create a pause or as somewhere to sit or play.

• You don't have to have No-Mow May everywhere - it's the little interventions we all make that will make the difference to gardening more in tune with nature.

With the organic top-dressing, we have no need to use artificial synthetic fertilisers, which take a lot of energy to produce and contain nitrate that runs off into water courses.

• The product we use is all natural, and we don't need to add anything more.

I love the physicality of this proper autumn work. It's so invigorating, not just for the lawn but for us as well

Further Resources

When looking for lawn machinery hire, it may be worth checking online for local independent hire centres near you. However, UK-wide options with many branches include:

• Brandon Hire Station
• Travis Perkins
• Hirebase

Assignment

Take time to observe the wildlife in your garden. Do you have any birds visiting? How many bees or butterflies can you spot? Have beetles or woodlice found homes under stones, logs or pots?

• Try noting down what you spot, even if you can't identify everything.

Troy highlights the importance of gardening in tune with nature and sharing your garden with wildlife. Think about how accessible your garden is for wildlife, and ways you can make your garden more wildlife-friendly.

Start with These Simple Steps

1. Aim for an organic approach like Troy and avoid using chemicals such as pesticides and weedkillers. A biodiverse garden is a healthy garden, and with the natural balance restored, the food web will keep numbers of less desirable visitors in check.

1. Put out water. A shallow dish of fresh water, containing some pebbles to allow insects such as bees to drink without drowning, will benefit birds, hedgehogs, insects and more, and save many lives during times of drought.

1. Include plants that support and provide for pollinators. The RHS Plants for Pollinators lists are the best place to start.

1. Allow a patch of lawn to grow long. Even a small patch provides huge benefits to a wide range of wildlife, from butterflies to hedgehogs.

1. If you have a pond, include a ramp to allow wildlife to drink safely or escape if they fall in, and include some wildlife-friendly pond plants.