Lawn care is often made very complex, let’s avoid that here and go through the key basic steps to having a nice green lawn.
Number 1 - Mowing
Regular cutting will help to promote lush and healthy growth. The main key to follow is the 1/3 rule where we only want to take off no more than a third of the grass blade in a single mow. Allowing the grass to grow tall then chopping it back down (example: from 80mm down to 30mm) every 3-4 weeks causes stress and ultimately discolouration and disease. Whereas if you can be mowing 1-2 times a week in prime growing seasons (generally October to April in Australia) and just be cutting down from say 40mm to 30mm that will be ideal for your lawn health. If you can’t mow frequently, make sure you mow slightly taller - we tend to cut our lawns ultra short in comparison to places like the USA but there’s nothing wrong with a very tidy 40-50mm lawn to allow for your busy schedule.
Number 2 - Watering
During dry periods it’s ideal to water your lawn deeply 1-2 times per week. This encourages the root system to grow deeper in search of water making it stronger and healthier. It is best to water early in the morning to minimise water loss to evaporation and also because watering at night can promote fungal disease in lawns.
An in ground irritation system is by far the best option for watering your lawn efficiently - but otherwise there are numerous options of portable sprinklers on the market. On my front lawn I use a mixture of sprinklers from Hoselink and absolutely love them!
Number 3 - Products
Proper mowing and watering when you have healthy soil will enable you to keep a very tidy lawn through large parts of the year when conditions are favourable, but applying products is where you can step it up a notch or 10. To keep this part simple - if you were to apply a quality slow release fertiliser like proliferate every 8-10 weeks between September and April/May you’d be miles ahead of 98% of your neighbourhood.
But hey look at you falling down the lawn care rabbit hole… we can be preventing and treating weeds, maximising water absorption with a wetting agent and getting absolutely optimised results with liquid fertilisers. I’ve got lawn care programs that have everything laid out in an annual plan with options for low, medium and high input (relating to time and money you have to put into your lawn), for all different Australian and NZ climates if you’re interested!
Apologies for the self plug but I’d be insane to spend 100+ hours creating these programs to help make lawn care easier for people then not promote them to someone reading an article about how to have a nice lawn wouldn’t I? Hahaha
Have fun nailing those basics of mowing and watering and if you start diving into product applications, all the best!!
