There’s something rather dramatic about a lawn in late August/early September after a summer like the one we’ve just had. We stopped counting the heatwaves after the hosepipe bans were brought in and instead just waited for the forecast to show rain – and it’s currently torrential as we write this.
Your lawn probably looks like our green public spaces. Brown, papery, defeated looking. And the temptation tends to be to rush at it with a hose the moment the ban lifts, as if we could simply undo three months of drought in an afternoon. We can’t – just like you can’t just heal sunburn overnight with a cold bath and some aloe vera.
Check the lawn
The first thing to do is nothing at all, except to look at it properly. You’ll need to get down on your knees and tug gently at the worst of the brown patches. If a clump lifts away in your hand, with the roots and all, then that bit of ground is dead and will need help. But, if it holds firm, if there’s resistance and a bit of green still hiding at the base, then what you’re looking at isn’t death. It’s dormancy – and you have permission to feel relieved.
Grass is far cleverer than we give it credit for, and shutting down growth in a drought is simply what it does to survive. Most of what looks catastrophic in August will green up again on its own once the rain returns, and the temperature drops. Patience in this instance, is all you need in reviving a lawn.
Careful grass watering
When the rain does come, resist the urge to add onto it with the hose or sprinkler. A great deluge onto baked, stressed ground does more harm than good. It encourages the roots to be shallow when they need to be doing quite the opposite. Little and often is what you want, coaxing the roots downward in search of moisture rather than letting them loiter near the surface.
Aeration
Now, once fingers can go into the soil without meeting what feels like concrete, normally early autumn once we’ve had some proper rain, get out there and aerate. This is the single most useful thing you can do all year. A summer like this bakes the ground hard, and no amount of feeding or seeding does a bit of good if water and air can’t get down to where the roots are. A hollow tine aerator is best if you can borrow or hire one, but even a garden fork pushed in every few inches will do the job on a smaller lawn. Imagine you’re pricking a jacket potato with a fork, only it’s the lawn.
Scarify
Scarify too, but gently, and only where it’s needed. There will likely be thatch and moss sitting in the thin patches of your lawn, and that wants raking out before you do anything else there. But this isn’t the year to go at the whole lawn with a hammer and tongs! The grass has had a hard enough summer without us adding to its troubles. Save the thorough scarifying for a kinder year – though in reality we may be looking at similar summers for the foreseeable.
Seeding
Where the ground truly is dead, and only there, that’s where you overseed. Rake back to bare soil, work in some compost if the earth looks particularly tired and thin, scatter your seed, and keep it damp while it germinates.
A reminder that this is where we see many gardeners waste good seed and good money, sowing into ground that was only ever sleeping and would have come back on its own regardless. Diagnosis before treatment is always the route to lawn repair.
Lawn Feeding
A single feed in autumn, one with a bit more potash than nitrogen, helps the roots recover their strength and toughens the grass up for whatever next summer will inevitably throw at it. What you don’t want is to force soft, lush growth with a nitrogen-heavy feed, not now.
Why not? Nitrogen is the nutrient that drives leafy, green growth above ground. A high-nitrogen feed tells the grass to put its energy into producing lots of soft new leaf tissue quickly – but that’s exactly the wrong instruction to give it. The grass has spent months conserving what little energy it had just to survive. What it needs in autumn is to rebuild its root system and toughen up before winter, not throw everything into fast top growth.
Lush leaf growth late in the season is more likely to be damaged by cold weather, and is also susceptible to fungal diseases like fusarium patch, which thrive in the damp, cooling conditions of autumn.
Address the root cause, not just symptoms
Finally, look at what the lawn is trying to tell you. If the same corner of the lawn gives up every time we get a dry spell, that’s a clue. Compacted soil, a thin layer of topsoil over something worse, a slope that dries out first, tree roots competing for what little moisture there is. Topdressing with good soil, and perhaps rethinking what you expect to grow well in that particular spot, will do more for you in the long run than any quantity of seed ever will.
The lawn will come back. It nearly always does. This autumn our garden maintenance teams will be bringing a lot of lawns back to life. If you’d like yours to be one of them, please get in touch.
