Has your lawn become patchy with a lot of dry plant material? How can you help get it back on track? In this blog, we take a look at a step by step guide on how to help get your lawn back in shape.
Skip to: What Is the Best Way to Remove Dry and Dead Material in My Lawn? Should I Aerate Damaged Turf? What Are the Benefits of Using a Soil Wetter? How Can I Help Promote New Growth and Recovery in My Lawn?
Step 1. What Is the Best Way to Remove Dry and Dead Material in My Lawn?
When first looking at getting your area to repair, the first step will be to pick up and remove the majority of the dry and dead plant material. By doing this, you will help create more space within the turf profile for the new plant material to grow back through.
To do this, we recommend raking through the area with a plastic rake. This won’t be too aggressive on the lawn but will effectively remove the unwanted material. When raking a buffalo lawn, be careful to ensure runners stay in shape and are not completely removed.
Step 2. Should I Aerate Damaged Turf?
Following this, it is then best to take a look at your soil. Often, if a particular area of your lawn has become damaged, aerating the soil can help. By doing this, it will help decompact the soil profile, allowing more space for air, water, and nutrients to move within the soil. This will help ensure the turf stays healthy.
One of the easiest ways to aerate your soil is with a garden fork. Simply push the garden fork down into the soil profile. Then give it a good wiggle to help fracture up the surrounding soil. Then repeat this process every 10cm across the affected area.
For more information on how to aerate your lawn, please have a look at our Aeration Blog.
Step 3. What Are the Benefits of Using a Soil Wetter?
If your turf has become dry and patchy, ensuring your soil can effectively absorb water down into the profile will help improve your lawn’s health. When soil becomes hydrophobic, water will either run off or pool at the surface rather than being absorbed into the soil profile. This is likely to be present in dry patches or heat-affected turf.
To help water better penetrate through the soil surface, we recommend using a wetting agent like Lawn Soaker. Lawn Soaker helps break down the wax-like substance, which can stop water from making its way down through the soil profile.
Lawn Soaker is now available in an easy-to-use 2L Hose-On bottle and a 2.5L Concentrate.
Step 4. How Can I Help Promote New Growth and Recovery in My Lawn?
Now, let’s focus on how to get some good new growth and recovery back in these patches. There are 3 main things to ensure you are doing:
- Watering Your Lawn
Water your lawn regularly while the turf is recovering. When watering your lawn, we recommend watering in the morning before the heat of the day and avoiding late afternoon/night watering. Depending on what the temperatures are doing in your local region, watering 2-3 times a week for around 25 minutes with a sprinkler that evenly covers the area will be sufficient.
- Mowing Your Lawn
Ensure you mow your lawn regularly to encourage new, consistent growth. The exact number of times you need to mow will be dependent on a few factors, including your grass type, weather, time of year, product applications, etc. So, as a general rule of thumb, it is best to follow the one-third rule. This is mowing your lawn frequently enough so that only one-third of the leaf is removed with each pass.
- Fertilising Your Lawn
Once the lawn has already shown signs of recovery and has experienced some new growth, look at applying a fertiliser to provide a boost in nutrients and growth. For fertiliser, we recommend using our Lawn Solutions Premium Fertiliser.
For more lawn care tips and advice, make sure you check out our other lawn care blogs.
