Lawn heresy

If I can be controversial for a moment - why do you do all the things to your lawns that you do do?

Everything depends on soil type and location, but even so. When we moved in 12 years ago, this lawn was kicked to death by football playing youngsters.


Since then it has not been replanted, resown, fed, watered, weeded, sprayed, spiked or sanded. It is mown often and I leave the grass box off for the first two cuts of the year. Yes - there are buttercups and daisies in it, but the mower chops their heads off. Grass growing from the base recovers quickly from the cut whereas the lawn "weeds" take much longer to recover from decapitation as they grow from their tops.

There are two more lawns beyond the trees in the old orchard. A natural spring keeps the ground moist and they are full of primroses, cowslips, bluebells etc. They are first cut with a sickle in late July when all have seeded. Then they are hover-mown until the end of October.

 

Heehee! My dad never sowed grass seed either, just used to mow the weeds and eventually a balance of grasses, daisys, dandelions and fairy rings established. It depends what you want.

A natural lawn will be hard wearing and drought tollerant but if you want a dead flat bolwling green then it requires more work.

A partitular 'thing' of mine is golf courses - I hate the green chemical deserts they maintain :D

 

Yes - golf course greens are dead boring, but elsewhere in the rough there are wonderful wild flower reserves quite safe from the farmers' killer sprays

 

That's coincental - my very overgrown garden (which has been left unattended for the whole of last year whilst we did a lot of work on the house) has just had its first proper lawn cut for about 18 months! It looks great already, and that is after a year of weeds, mess and the rest. The only thing I did before cutting it was to dig out the dandelions (of which there were MANY!)

It is very motivational experience to see the garden beginning to look more of a garden shape!

 

Whilst I was waiting for my hip operations, the lawn went without mowing for most of the year It looked really pretty, with loads of flowers, just like a proper meadow When daughters came back from college and holidays I was quite sad to see it go. The grass didn't seem to suffer much in this case, either.

 

your lawn looks great, i also prefere the natural look a few buttercups and daisy always look good

 

How about hearing it for the stripey lawn? My clients love them. Don't need weedkillers, just a bit of fertilizer aqnd a rear roller on the mower.



Curvy stripes, straight lines, cross hatching, whatever. they look good nestled into wilder areas as well. I have a garden where the adjacent long grass gets cut in July (and occasionally earlier by confused employees) that I built 5 or so years ago which is now supporting a fine collection of green winged and early purple orchids, rattle and ox-eyes and eye brights.

 

And that isn't it...For some inexplicable reason I don't have pictures of the orchids, but I will take them this summer!

 

Here are snaps of the common spotted and the lawn they grow in. Inexplicably the green veined orchids are on strike this year. Bah! Humbug!

 

Whoops, bit of a basic error here. Having common spotted orchids adjacent 'in the rough' as it were I have for a couple of years assumed these would be the same that had made it into the garden proper. Having eventually taken my excusion flora out with me I discover they are in fact Pyramidal Orchids. Ah well, a third kind in the garden. Can't be all bad.

 

In my profile I have put my hobbies down as cutting grass because that is all I seem to do! Mowing, strimming, flymo - concentrate on one area and all the others grow - my grass (can't call them lawns) is never pampered and I never use the grass box on the mower.
I don't seem to 'garden' - more like stop the elements taking it back again....