4 easy tips for a beautiful lawn

Your lawn's the first thing anyone notices about your home so you need to keep it in good shape. When it’s looking tired, faded or worn these tips will help you revive and care for it.

You put in a lot of effort into make your lawn beautiful. Being so exposed to the elements, people and vehicles, your lawn can suffer from being accidentally dug up, being overtaken by weeds or just get worn down. That’s when your lawn maintenance comes in.

To restore its vigour you can overseed, which means spreading seed on an established lawn. Follow these steps:

• Mow existing grass in the area to 2.5 centimetre and rake vigorously with a flexible spring rake to remove as much of the clippings, old grass and thatch as possible.
• Make sure you pull out any weeds.
• Rough up the soil with an iron rake and sprinkle a 1.5-centimetre-deep layer of topsoil or compost over the spot.
• Level the surface with the back of a sturdy metal rake, if needed, then rough it lightly with a flexible spring rake to accept seed.
• Spread the seed over the area by hand or with a drop spreader, water lightly and keep the soil moist by misting it as often as needed with a hose fitted with a spray nozzle until the seeds germinate.
• You can mow the new grass after it reaches five to eight centimetres in height.

If the solution to reviving your lawn is to patch it, keep these tips in mind:

• If your grass is a creeping, sod-forming type, you can be sure of an exact match when patching it if you transplant plugs taken from other parts of your own yard.
• When patching a tuft-forming grass with seed, check the package label to make sure the seed you buy has a high germination rate. It needs to be more than 80 percent.

Weeds! Don’t you just love them? If you follow these easy steps, you can rid your lawn of weeds for a long time to come:

• Do you have a concentrated patch of weeds in the lawn? Spread a sheet of clear plastic over the area and weight the cover down with stones.
• In about eight weeks, heat from the sun will kill weeds, weed seeds and most insects and diseases in the upper few centimetres of soil. This slick process is called solarization.
• Afterwards, rake up and throw away the dead weeds before preparing the soil for new grass.

Having a beautiful and consistently green lawn takes care and patience. With these easy steps, you’ll have a lawn to be proud of in no time.