Scarifying is a vital maintenance technique that removes moss or dead organic material from your lawn. Leaving moss and other debris on your lawn can suffocates the roots of the grass, depriving them of nutrients and encouraging further weed growth. Follow our step by step guide for top tips for lawn scarification.
Scarifying is a vital maintenance technique that removes moss or dead organic material from your lawn. Leaving moss and other debris on your lawn can suffocates the roots of the grass, depriving them of nutrients and encouraging further weed growth. Follow our step by step guide for top tips for lawn scarification.
Autumn is the best time to scarify
There are fewer weeds around, making it less likely that they will grow in place of the grass. You should try and scarify thinly in the spring months, when weed growth is more rapid and prominent.
After scarification, you should first take a step back and see if you have exposed any hidden problems with your lawn. Have you found any weeds, or discovered that your moss or thatch problem was bigger than you first thought? Also, make sure that your lawn is clear from any debris caused by scarification. If your scarifier did not have a collection box, you will need to go around the garden and collect up all the debris.
First deal with the weeds. Pull them up and use lawn friendly weed killer to get rid of them. Its best to deal with weeds before the warm weather encourages them to grow, making it a much bigger problem to deal with in the long run.
Next tackle the moss. If you haven’t managed to remove all the moss from your lawn during scarification, go around your lawn with a moss killer. Now that you have removed the biggest moss patches, the moss killer should have a much bigger effect on the remaining pieces.
Once the moss and weeds have been taken care of, focus on enabling your lawns recovery. First off, you need to ensure that your lawn has all the nutrients that it needs to grow - to do this, use a suitable lawn fertiliser.
If you are scarifying your lawn in the autumn - use an autumn lawn fertiliser. These typically release their nutrients at a much slower rate, which encourages longer term health and growth during the colder months. If you have scarified your lawn in the spring, then a spring time fertiliser is probably best to help encourage rapid grass growth. When doing this, ensure that the lawn has plenty of water. Also continue to water your lawn regularly for the next few weeks if it has not been raining.
For areas of your garden that have become bare during the scarification process, then you should consider reseeding these areas of your lawn. This is relevant if you are scarifying your lawn in the spring.
March to April is the ideal time to begin growing grass from seeds. Not only does this help your lawn look great but it helps prevent other pests, like moss from growing in its place, helping reduce any long term health effects. When seeding your lawn, remember to add a little top soil to cover the seed and help it to grow. In addition to this, you should aerate your lawn, to relieve any compaction in the soil, and allow oxygen and water to reach the grass roots. This is turn, promotes increased grass growth.
For the next few weeks, if you need to cut the grass with your lawn mower, you should do this at a slightly higher setting than you normally do. This will help prevent moss and other pests from attacking the less covered areas of the lawn, and help provide any shade to the balder patches of grass helping the soil retain moisture.
