October is the month to start getting things prepared for the winter months. The lawns will start to slow down a little bit now and growth will not be nearly as rapid as it has been over the wet summer months. The fertiliser dosage that we are putting down will reflect this and will concentrate on stabilising roots and keeping the colour rather than growth. With it being so wet hollow tine aeration and an autumn feed as well as moss control will be high on the agenda of things to do in the month ahead.
You’ll find that you will be coming to an end of mowing the lawn in the next few weeks too (unless we get a surprise week or two of decent sunshine). This will mean that you will need to raise the mower at least one setting and if moss is present then take it up another notch to keep the grass above the moss. You want at least half an inch of grass above the moss if possible. As always targeting the moss through scarifying is the only way to clear it out and give the lawn a fighting chance. Contact us for a quote.
The next treatment which we will be applying is the moss control which will identify just exactly how much moss you have in the lawn and how bad the moss is. You will notice that the areas greatly affected by the moss will go black. This is an effective way to slow down the moss as the sun cannot penetrate through the ferrous sulphate solution to promote more growth. Of course over a period of time the moss control will begin to wear off. We recommend that you have the extra moss treatment to start the year if moss is a persistent problem in your lawn. Again contact us if that’s something you’d like to have.
One surefire way to help the lawn through the autumn months is to keep the lawn free of leaves. Although this is a thankless task and something that will cause you a little more work than usual it will keep the lawn exposed to the sunlight and keep it from becoming shaded thereby creating a better environment for the moss and other decaying material which will increase fungal growth and worm casts. You can do this by regularly blowing the leaves off, using your mower to suffer them up or just raking the lawn manually.
Total Weedkillers
Please be careful when using total weedkillers. The gardener of this lawn used some to kill the weeds in the borders, then proceeded to walk up and down the lawn with chemical on his feet. Hence the destruction the same size as his feet! He didn’t have a clue what...
