Does your lawn look terrible when compared with your neighbour’s?
Two lawns located right next to each other can look completely different, depending on how well they’ve been cared for.
In this guide, we’ve explained three reasons why your neighbour’s lawn looks better than yours so that you can reclaim bragging rights for the best lawn on your street.
1. Their lawn is mowed more often
This might seem a bit counterintuitive, but lawns actually prefer being mown more often.
Ideally, you want to take off just a third of the height of each grass blade, each time you mow. And for best results, you want to raise the cutting height on your mower nearly as high as it goes. If you’re trying to make your lawn a lot shorter, you want to do this gradually, assuming you want to take more than a third off, using a few cuts over the course of a week or two.
This is because a small cut actually stimulates grass growth, helping your lawn to grow thicker and fuller.
On the other hand, if you leave it a long time in between each mow, chances are, you’re doing quite a large cut each time. This can seriously stress out your lawn, making it grow more sparse, and even affecting its colour over time. Also, if you leave lots of clippings on your lawn, as a result of doing a big mow, they can clump up and block sunlight from reaching your lawn, resulting in bare patches and moss growth.
2. Their lawn is better-fed
Like with us, good nutrition and a balanced diet are key to a healthy lawn.
Apart from helping to encourage thicker, fuller growth, feeding your lawn also helps to prevent weeds from taking over, because your lawn will be stronger.
Although adding too many grass clippings to your lawn can cause issues, as we mentioned above, in moderation you can use grass cuttings to feed your lawn – this is called “mulching”.
By spreading your grass clippings on your lawn as you mow, they’ll decompose over time, releasing valuable nutrients that your lawn can feast on. This is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to feed your lawn.
Apart from mulching, you can also spread compost or fertilizer on your lawn a few times a year, ideally at least in the mid-spring and mid-fall. However, avoid adding too much fertilizer at any one time, or this can scorch your lawn, and leave brown spots.
3. Their lawn has better drainage or aeration
If you know you and your neighbour have a similar lawn care routine, and you can’t figure out why their lawn looks better than yours, you might need to look below the surface.
If you notice that water tends to sit on your lawn in places after rain, you might have a drainage problem, which will affect the health of your lawn.
To fix this, you can use an aerator, to create some drainage holes in your lawn, which will reduce compaction, and also improve aeration. Rather than just using a garden fork to poke holes in the soil, it’s important to use a hollow-tine aerator, to remove the cores of dirt as you go. This creates a longer-lasting hole and will make for more effective aeration.
It could also be the case that your lawn has too much thatch, which is blocking air and sunlight from reaching your lawn’s roots. Thatch is the layer of dead organic matter that sits underneath the grass blades, but above the soil. It’s normal to have about half an inch of thatch, but if there’s more than 3/4 of an inch, this could be the reason why your lawn doesn’t look great.
To fix a thatch problem, first stop leaving your grass clippings on your lawn – bag them instead, to avoid exacerbating the thatch problem. Then, you’ll want to scarify your lawn.
Scarification is the process of removing dead organic matter from around the stems of each grass plant, normally using a walk-behind scarification machine. Scarification also helps to cut into the soil, helping to reduce compaction and improve the amount of air that your lawn’s roots are receiving.
Lawn scarifiers are normally petrol-powered and can be quite expensive, so it’s typically best to rent one for a day to complete the scarification process, especially since it only needs to be done once a year.
After scarifying your lawn, it will look pretty terrible for about a month – this is perfectly normal. Once your lawn has recovered, been fed and mown regularly, and had the chance to grow strongly again, your grass will soon be the envy of your neighbours.
Article is written in collaboration with lawncarepro.co.uk
