Advice on rejuvinating lawn

John mcginley

John mcginley

John mcginley

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Joined
11 Apr 2021
Posts
2
Hi,

This year have decided to do some work on our back lawn to try and make it look better (currently have a lot of moss). Been doing research online and looking to see if my plan makes sense or if there are things I should watch out for

Background :-
  • we are in the West of Scotland
  • for the past 25 years at least the lawn has only ever been cut, maybe a bit of weed & feed on the odd occasion
  • not very knowledgeable gardeners
  • lawn is approx 100m2 (10m x 10m)
My plan is within the next week (mid-April) :-
  • cut lawn to low height
  • use a verticutter to go over, couple of times in different directions
  • apply soluble ferrous sulphate with mix which is recommended for killing moss, as with the verticutter - couple of times in different directions
  • leave for 1 week or so
  • use the verticutter again to remove remaining moss
  • Aerate lawn - probably going to be with the shoe spikes
  • overseed and apply top-soil (seed first and then top soil ?)
  • after 5-6 weeks apply another round of soluble ferrous sulphate
Any knowledgeable gardeners out there see any major issues with this, from most of the research I've looked at I know the recommended time to do this would be towards autumn time but I am where I am now and hope that by starting now, maybe by June/July could have something which looks better.

All advice welcomed.

Thanks
 
If you are adding top soil to level then save some to coat/protect the grass seed, the birds will be visiting otherwise.

Edit: feed it every couple of weeks with liquid seaweed.
 
Last edited:
Thanks all. I'd swayed between scarifier/verticutter and for some reason decided on the verticutter, hope that's not something I regret. Thanks for the link to the site for the aerator hire, ideally I wanted to put hollows into the lawn but apart from the manual fork type things couldn't see anything to buy which would do it, will check out the hire.

For the top soil, my plan was to overseed first then light rake and then put the top soil on after and water. Hoping that would get the grass seed to germinate and keep the birds away.

Frost last night and light snow today, was hoping weather would be picking up by now, hopefully next week brings a bit of warmth.
 
I've always brought some of that "Westland all in one" and scattered that on my lawn, kills the weeds and moss and makes the grass grow like crazy.
 
Living in military married quarters every garden we have ever had has been awful. Luckily the house we are currently in has a decent sized garden which gets a good amount of sunlight.

Last year during lockdown we had a small competition with our neighbours on both sides to see who could have the nicest lawn :D I honestly didn't realise that roughly 70% of our garden was moss. After several weed and feeds it looked awful (black dead moss everywhere).

After raking it out we were left with a seriously patchy lawn. I borrowed a manual aerator (a roller with spikes) and got to work poking holes in the mud. after that we seeded the lawn and covered with a thin layer of top soil. We were watering the lawn every night and after about a month or so the garden was looking amazing. I think we fed the lawn every 4 weeks or so and watered regularly during the summer months along with the 2 weekly grass cut.

We've recently done our first round of grass cutting to get the levels down and done the first round of Weed and Feed. There are a few patches where the weeds have come back over winter but its a vast improvement over what we started with last year.

As this isn't my garden I'm reluctant to go to huge lengths for a beautiful lawn, i'd almost be afraid to use a scarifier as i know these lawns haven't been looked after further than a grass cut.
 
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