6 lawn care myths that waste your time

Most lawn advice gets handed down rather than checked

Lawns attract more confident bad advice than anything else in the garden, mostly because everybody has one and everybody has an opinion about it, and a fair bit of what gets repeated over the fence was never true in the first place. Here are the ones that cost people the most time.

1. Cutting it short means less mowing

It feels like it should work and it does the opposite. Scalping a lawn takes off the leaf the plant uses to feed itself, so it responds by throwing up weak fast growth from a stressed root system, and you end up with thin patchy grass that lets weed seed straight in. The rule that works is never take more than a third of the blade height in one cut, so if it has got away from you, drop the height over two or three mows rather than in one hit. Warm season grasses like couch and kikuyu will take a low cut, and buffalo wants to stay up around 40mm to 50mm, so the right height depends on what you actually have.

2. Watering in the sun scorches the grass

The story is that droplets act like little magnifying glasses and burn the leaf, and it is not true. What is true is that most of the water you put on at midday evaporates before it gets anywhere near a root, so you are paying for water that never arrives. Early morning is the time to water. Late afternoon and evening watering gets recommended constantly and it leaves the leaf wet all night, which is exactly the condition fungal disease wants, so on a lawn it causes more problems than it solves.

3. More fertiliser means faster growth

Past a point, extra nitrogen buys you soft sappy leaf that needs mowing more often, burns in the heat and gets eaten by everything, and if you put too much on at once you will literally scorch the lawn and leave the pattern of the spreader in it for a month. Water it in properly after you feed, feed lightly and more often rather than heavily and rarely, and remember that in a dry spell a hungry lawn is usually a thirsty lawn.

4. All grass wants the same treatment

This is the one that causes the most wasted effort around here, because warm season and cool season grasses want almost opposite management. Couch, kikuyu and buffalo grow hard through summer and slow right down in the cold. Fescue and rye do their best work in the cool months and struggle in February. Feed a warm season lawn heading into the warm months and a cool season lawn heading into the cool ones, and you get the result you were after with half the product.

5. Leaving the clippings causes thatch

Clippings are mostly water and they break down within days, putting a useful amount of nitrogen back into the lawn for nothing. Thatch is the layer of tough stems and runners that builds up under the surface, and it comes from vigorous growth and infrequent mowing rather than from clippings. So mulch them back in, as long as you are mowing often enough that you are not leaving rows of wet clumps sitting on top.

6. A brown lawn in winter is a dead lawn

Worth knowing before anybody spends money fixing something that is not broken. Warm season grasses go dormant when the soil cools down, and couch and kikuyu will go straw-coloured over winter and green up again on their own once the soil warms. That is the grass doing exactly what it is supposed to do. Feeding it hard or watering it more while it is dormant achieves nothing except growing moss and weeds in the gaps. The test is simple enough, because dormant grass has firm runners that are still green inside when you scratch a bit of thatch back, and dead grass pulls up in your hand.

One that is not a myth

A blunt mower blade tears the grass instead of cutting it, and torn leaf tips go white and brown off within a couple of days, which is why a lawn can look burnt a week after a mow for no obvious reason. If the lawn looks whitish the day after you cut it, the blade is the problem rather than the fertiliser.

Shop related products

• Brunnings Tough Lawn Seed 1kg. For thickening up a thin lawn rather than scalping it.
• Brunnings Turbo Patch Repairer 800g. For the bare spots left by a hard cut.
• Brunnings Feed n Weed 3.5L. Feeds and handles broadleaf weeds in the one pass.
• Seasol Seaweed Concentrate 1L. A tonic for a lawn that has had a hard summer.

Did you know we also stock kikuyu lawn seed in a blend and a premium grade, granular lawn fertilisers, soil wetter and soaker hose in the garden centre, and a fair bit of that is not on the website, so give us a ring on (08) 8536 4333 to check what is on the shelf.

More from the garden centre

The seed, the feed and the watering gear are all in the garden centre, and if you are not sure what grass you have, bring in a photo of a runner and we will have a look.

Keep reading

• Frustrated by lawn weeds? Here is a natural solution
• How to turn a lawn into a low-maintenance one
• How to grow vegetables that are perfect for the South Australian climate

I still mow mine a notch lower than I tell everybody else to, and my lawn is not the one in the photos.

Candeece