Over the course of the wintertime, heavy rain and adverse weather can take its toll on your garden, leaving your lawn looking boggy and soggy and leaving you in quite the quagmire of your own.
To help ensure your garden stays in tip-top condition, follow these top tips from the experts and keep your lawn above water this winter.
Preventing a Muddy Lawn in Winter
As the old saying goes, prevention is better than a cure – not to mention, in the case of gardening, far easier to implement!
That being said, in order to prevent a muddy lawn, it’s important to understand what causes a muddy lawn. This is usually down to a small handful of reasons, usually relating to poor drainage.
Muddy lawns are often the result of compaction, a poor root system or uneven lawns. Fortunately, none of these presents your lawn with a death sentence and there are simple solutions to all of these issues.
Aerating Your Lawn
Areas of high footfall can suffer from compacted soil due to the high level of traffic walking over it. As a result, the tightly packed soil leaves rainwater with nowhere to drain, leaving the water to rest on the surface where it becomes boggy.
Common in clay soil, compaction can be remedied by regular aeration. This allows air and water to flow deeper into the soil, enhancing the soils water uptake, strengthening roots and reducing water run-off as a result.
Level the Playing Field
If waterlogging is occurring as a result of an uneven lawn, you will need to level off your lawn surface to prevent such instances reoccurring. Mildly uneven lawns can be evened out over time using a simple topdressing at a rate of half an inch each attempt.
For larger areas of uneven grass, you may want to try the “sweep under the carpet” method. As the name suggests this simply means cutting out the piece of turf which is uneven and packing underneath to make it level.
If the problem area is larger than one square foot, it’s worth cutting multiple patches of sod to avoid breaking the removed patch. Once removed, fill the gap with enough topsoil to leave the surface level once the sod has been replaced.
Treating a Muddy Lawn in Winter
Before taking any action to fix your soggy grass, it’s important to make sure that your lawn isn’t completely waterlogged to begin with.
Use a broom to brush off as much excess surface water as possible by brushing towards the edges of your lawn. If the weather is good, you may want to leave it thereafter to allow additional surface water to evaporate.
Be sure to avoid walking on the lawn during this time as well as this can only worsen the effects of your lawn, causing turf to become damaged even further.
For more winter garden tips or for professional garden services this winter, why not drop us a line today? Call now on 0800 111 4958 or get in touch online by clicking the button below.
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