Small Gardening issue, big gardening headache...

Hi - hoping somebody can help...

We recently moved to our new home and have started on the garden - after the first cut we noticed a lot of moss and subsequently tried evergreen 4 in 1 to try and fix it - 2 weeks later and after another cut, we are left with the attached photo - 40% of the grass covered in black patches of dead moss - what to do from here?

Evergreen suggested raking it up but this hasn't worked very well so far...

 

Hello and welcome.

I don't rate those all in one mixes I'm afraid. I think it would be just as effective to sprinkle your cash on the lawn.

To save getting tell't off by @Sheal, I have to say that the advice I'm about to offer is not appropriate if your garden soil is already very sandy, but here goes.

Best way to deal with moss is not to kill and remove the existing moss, because it will just come back, very quickly. You need to tackling the underlying cause, which is usually that the very surface of the soil is moist and shady. It would be shady if the grass was a bit long for any length of time, and the most likely reason for it to be damp at the surface (assuming it hasn't been flooded in the recent floods) would be that an impenetrable crust (called a 'pan') has formed on the surface. This is where the top few millimeters gets so compacts that water can't escape through it.

So aeration is the way to go at first. You can hire machines to do it, or if you've got my patience than I have you can go round with the fork, just sticking the fork in, give it a wiggle, then repeat about 1ft back, and keep doing it until you've punctured holes all over the lawn.

Then comes the sand. Moss hates it and grass loves it. Moss hates it because having extremely short roots, if there's a layer of sand, it can't reach down into the soil to collect water and nutrients. Grass loves it because it keeps the air flowing at the surface and provides a nice loose medium for new roots to penetrate through.

So what I do once or twice per year is to scatter sharp sand over the lawn. Where there's an existing moss problem as in your case, I then rake very brutally, once the sand is down. This serves a number of purposes. The brutal raking rips out moss, but with the sharp sand present, the sand itself cuts out a lot more moss than raking alone. The brutal raking also further busts the crust (pan) thus improving drainage at the very surface, and the sharp sand also gets nicely spread around the surface, improving drainage and aeration and making life difficult for moss and easier for grass. The presence of sharp sand at the soil surface also slows down soil compaction, as sharp sand wont compact. If you were to look at it under a microscope it would look like tiny shard of very sharp rock (hence sharp sand). So every time you walk on it, it sticks in the soil surface breaking up any crust that's starting to form.

If you go to the garden centre, they will have 'lawn sand', which is considerably more expensive than sharp sand from the builder's yard section. I wouldn't buy that. I didn't invent the sharp sand trick, it was taught to me by much more experienced gardeners than me. It really does make a big difference for surprisingly little cost and effort.

 

Welcome to GC Newbie. I'm not an ogre, really! I've nagged Clueless a couple of times as he's tended to omit the fact it's no good putting sand on a lawn that's grown on a sandy soil like mine.

Did you use a lawn rake or a garden rake? This is the sort of thing you need with long tines.....

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Draper-8880..._1_1?s=outdoors&ie=UTF8&qid=1399318460&sr=1-1

 

ahhh interesting, i have raked my garden twice in a fortnight to clear the moss. I have pulled up 2 plastic buckets full of the stuff

Is it still ok to put down the sand now?

what about the other stuff in the lawn like the dandelions and daisy? general weed killer?

 

How many dandelions are there? I can't see any in your photo. If there's only a few, and your lawn is more lawn than dandelion, then the trick is to take a large flat blade screwdriver, and push it in straight down close to the very centre of the rosette of leaves. Then simply lever it out, pulling away from the dandelion. This will sever the tap root below the surface. The dandelion wont be dead at this point, but with your usual lawn care regime, consisting of regular mowing, it will give the grass a chance to thicken up before the dandelion regenerations from the remains of its root, and the grass will win.

Daisies don't form a tap root, so the same trick wont work for them. But the question is, are daisies a problem? For some people they are but I personally think they belong in the lawn.