It’s day one of deciding to turn your lawn around, where do we start? Let’s keep it short and simple to get you going in the right direction.
Here are 3 things you can do today if you’re at the very beginning of your lawn care journey:
Sharpen or replace your mower blades.
This will help to have a nice clean cut and healthier lawn straight away. Depending on the size of your lawn this is a great practice to do every 4-6 weeks or so. If you’ve got an older mower you might need some assistance from a mower shop to get the current blades off, but from then on you’ll be able to do it easily with some basic hand tools. Extended video about sharpening and maintaining mower blades here, it was early in my YouTube days so don't judge too harshly!! haha
Mow your lawn 1-2 times per week.
Regular mowing is one of the biggest keys to producing lush and healthy growth. Your height of cut is important relative to how often you can mow your lawn- if you want to mow short (under 20mm) then you need to mow often. Most of the time I recommend mowing taller (40mm+) as an effective way to get a nicer result with your lawn, for more info on the topic watch this video!
Join the ‘Australian lawn fanatics’ Facebook group.
Soak up all the info from different posts. Also, get down a YouTube rabbit hole. Go on I dare you!! Great channels to check out are ‘Lawn Tips’ and ‘The Aussie Lawn’, as well as my own I guess!
Now let me give you the good news if you’ve got a thick and overgrown lawn: this is the BEST kind of starting point because all you need to do is chop it down to as low as your mower goes. It’ll look a little rough for a little while but from now aim to water 1-2 times a week when there’s no rain, treat your weeds, put out some granular fertiliser every 10ish weeks or even follow a lawn program if you’re super keen for the result of a beautiful green lawn!
If you’ve got a bare and patchy lawn there are a few possible causes. HOPEFULLY with some regular mowing and giving it some added water/nutrition it will naturally spread and fill in (as most Australian lawn care varieties do). Often this is enough for a struggling lawn to really improve, especially if the soil is nice and healthy underneath, just needing a bit of extra love. If the areas are extremely dry, firm/compacted and struggling to grow anything then you could do something like aerate the soil with a pitchfork and add a high nutrient compost type of soil to the area to loosen it up and increase fertility- or even do something like I did here to repair bare patches!
I’ve written a longer article about bare patches here but overall if you can mow often and apply some quality fertiliser at least semi regularly, you’ll be well on the way to a great lawn!
Something important to note before we sign off: weather conditions and time of year when trying to improve your lawn is very important.
For me in SE Victoria with a warm season grass type called Kikuyu I can actively be improving my lawn from around September to March/April. May to August though it’s cold and my lawn barely grows so establishing new grass is almost impossible. If it’s winter when you’re reading this then you’ll need to set yourself for the spring time to start ripping into your lawn and boy oh boy what a time it will be!!! Enjoy!
