Farcebook

Tag: Lawn

  • Trying to repair my lawn

    Trying to repair my lawn

    Grass at home doesn’t do well, I don’t know whether it’s my inconsistent mowing, the shaded parts of the garden where the grass is, or that the soil is thick and full of heavy clay on a layer of building rubble. Possibly it’s also the slightly too agressive mowing I did last year in an attempt at making the grass more bushy and the lawn less patchy when mown.

    Either way, it looks a right mess, there’s barely any grass. So I’m on a mission to fix it.

    First I gave the remnants a mow, then pronged the ground to aerate it a bit and to break up the soil.

    Then I sprinkled on some fertiliser, grass seed and in one area where nobody goes, a few boxes of cheap wild flower mix. There’s one corner of the garden where grass doesn’t do very well, so I’m going to try growing some wild flowers instead. There’s usually a lot of grass amongst those mixes so it should fill out.

    The last step was to cover the whole thing in three bags of sand. This should keep the birds off, protect the seed while it germinates, and over time work its way into the soil helping to break it up.

    Now I just need to leave it alone and hope the cats don’t want to investigate a new giant litter tray!

  • Hoarding water for the summer

    Hoarding water for the summer

    I promise that this blog isn’t just a log of my attempt to cover my garden in plastic barrels of water, but it rains a lot in the winter, it doesn’t rain in the summer, I have a water meter and spraying chlorinated water on plants doesn’t seem like a good idea.

    I’ve replaced the small water butt next to my garden shed with a bigger one. The small one was full of some rather horrible smelling brown water. I think this is from the roof garden, but I’d have thought all of that would filter out the fine bits of soil up there by now?

    I managed to find enough bits of random drainpipe lying around to make things neatly flow into the water butt. It’s a bit awkward because there’s two pipes and only one hole in the lid.

    I then half filled the water butt using one of the others. I now have something like 700L of water storage now. Should help in the summer when it stops raining and I need to water things. Also when I water the roof garden and it starts to run out, it’ll go back into the water butt and not be wasted.

    In attempt at containing the mud and helping the lawn grow I’ve given it a good stabbing with a lawn aerator and then covered it in a layer of sand. The ground is full of clay and very sticky. I noticed that when it rains water runs over the surface of the ground instead of soaking in.

    I also put a bag of gravel on the slope behind the shed to control the rain that hits it. I’d like to find a few large stones and put them down too.

    The grass will be fine, it’ll come back. I’m planning on re-seeding it anyway with some grass that copes better in shaded locations.

    Finally I was getting tired of tracking mud into my shed, so found two paving slabs and just put them down as stepping stones. At the moment they’re lying on the surface of the ground. If I like where they are I’ll put them into the ground in a more permanent way.

    A typical British lawn with straggy grass, worm casts and the odd bit of moss.

    A job for warmer and drier weather is to sort out a more neat looking path.