Lawn maintenance techniques, how to care for your lawn.

Why Have a Lawn?
A lawn is the canvas on which you can draw the colorful garden you dream about. In winter it will provide colour and life when other plants are scarce. In summer it will pull together and frame all the features and colours in your garden.

A lawn is also extremely useful! Think about it for a moment - it's great for walking on, ideal for playing games on and lovely for just sitting on. It's soft, good looking and provides a forgiving surface when kids and adults trip over.

Modern grasses are very forgiving of neglect and severe weather. With very little lawn care and maintenance, they can be improved greatly. Let GardenAction show you how to make the most of the lawn in your garden.

HOW TO USE THIS ARTICLE

This article explains all about lawn care and maintenance, and some of it may not be relevant to you at this point in time. If this is the case, please do use the 'Quick Index' towards the top left of each page.

Simply click on a topic in the list and you will be re-directed to your chosen subject. The 'Quick Index' appears on each page so it's easy to skip around subjects.

Remember that these pages on lawn care automatically adjust all dates (sowing, planting harvesting etc.) to be correct for the area where you live. But only if you record your home town with us.

If you haven't done this yet, do it now by clicking here. It will only take a minute and once done it never need be done again!

How To Care For Your Lawn
First, you need the correct tools and equipment and these will depend on the size of your lawn and the use you make of it. As in all things in life, the type of tools will also depend on how much you have available to spend. Maintaining and caring for your lawn is definitely easier with a bit of knowledge and the correct tools.

Essential Tools

LAWNMOWER
Without a lawnmower, maintaining a lawn is going to be extremely hard work. Luckily enough there is a range of lawnmowers to suit most pockets and don't forget that adverts for cheap second hand lawnmowers can be found in many magazines.

Lawnmowers are available in many types, the choice is very varied and it's important to select the best one for you and your garden. The most common types are:

manual side wheel mowers
manual and electric roller mowers
electric and petrol rotary mowers
electric and petrol hover mowers
petrol cylinder mowers
'sit on' petrol mowers

Click here to go to our page which describes the advantages and disadvantages of each type of lawn mower in more detail.

EDGE TRIMMER / STRIMMER
You need some method of tidying up the edges of the lawn. The ideal tool for trimming lawn edges is a powered 'strimmer'. This can be either electric or petrol powered.

The next best tool for this job are edging shears. Special shears are required because using normal shears would be a back-breaking job on all except the smallest of lawns.

WIRE RAKE
Essential for scarifying the lawn. See the picture on the left for the correct type of rake to choose for this job. Other types of rake are not nearly so good at the job.

A rake is also great for clearing up leaves and other debris from the lawn

GARDEN FORK
A good way to get air (aerate) into the soil beneath the lawn. Simply dig the fork into the lawn every 30cm (1 foot) or so to open up the soil and improve drainage.

It is also possible to buy what is called a hollow tine fork. This is simply a fork but normally has only three slightly larger but hollow spikes. Each time you dig, it removes three small cores of soil from the ground This type of fork is especially useful for heavy or compacted soil.

HOSE REEL AND SPRINKLER
If local laws permit, a hose reel and sprinkler are essential for providing additional water in dry conditions. The range of sprinklers is immense, but often the cheapest and simplest types are the most reliable.

Useful Tools

ELECTRIC SCARIFIER
Does the same job as the rake of scarifying the lawn, but in a third of the time. This really become an essential unless you have a small lawn. As well as scarifying the lawn this electric tool is very good at picking up small amounts of leaves.

It is possible to buy attachments for many lawnmowers which convert them into scarifiers. These are a very good option.

EDGING IRON
Using an edging iron is definitely the best way of digging out a neat edge to your lawn. Best done only once a year in Spring.

A spade can be used instead of an edging iron, but it's not as good at the job.

PLASTIC EDGING
Having dug out your edges neatly with an edging iron, plastic edging is the ideal way to keep them neat and tidy.

ELECTRIC BLOWER / VACUUM
These are often bought because people believe they can be used to vacuum leaves up from a lawn. In fact their main use is to blow large amounts of leaves into piles making it easier to pick them up by hand. Useful only if you have a large lawn. A rake is just as effective on small to medium sized lawns.

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