How to guide: Topdressing your Lawn
Now is the perfect time to topdress an existing lawn. Use our Topdressing Sand and Soil mix to add light material to the surface of the lawn before re-seeding and feeding. Topdressing has a number of benefits including controlling thatch, drainage, and smoothing the lawn surface!
Scarifying and Aeration...
Scarifying with a machine or rake removes thatch from lawns for improved topdressing and re-seeding. Thatch is a layer of a combination of living and dead plant matter including crowns, stolons, rhizomes, and roots, that accumulates on a lawn around the base of the grass plants
Heavy raking or scarifying will thin the lawn leaving soil exposed in many places. This makes an ideal seed bed not only for over-seeding with new and improved grass seed. By scarifying in September you will avoid the bulk of the years weed seeds too.
Aeration involves perforating the soil with small holes to allow air, water and nutrients to penetrate the grass roots; we suggest using a machine or you can pick up some spiked shoes which are really cost effective!
This helps the roots grow deeply and produce a stronger lawn. The main reason for aerating is to alleviate soil compaction and the lawn becoming hard and concrete like.
Once these steps have been taken you can move onto using a topdressing sand over your lawn.
Topdress and over-seed...
Our Topdressing is a 70/30% blend of screened silica sand and topsoil, screened down to about 3mm, making it perfect for working in-between existing grass blades and down to the roots. This is especially useful technique to use on sparse lawns.
- You Dandy's Hardwearing Grass Seed to over-seed bare patches and for general lawn feeding brush the topdressing over your grass at a depth of 1-2mm. We find a garden brush is perfect for this. Make sure you have raked the lawn first to break up the surface and remove any moss, leaves and weeds.
- Sow the seed at a rate of around 10 - 15 gms per m2 and lightly rake into the surface - this also helps to avoid birds and rodents eating your seed! If birds are a problem you may wish to add a net over your lawn until the seed germinates.
- Give the seed a good water with a sprinkler. You should see new growth in around 10 days!
Patch repair...
For areas where the grass is completely bare you will add a fresh topsoil and either seed or lay turf. Here at Dandy's we sell our Lawnmix Topsoil in small bags, making it perfect for jobs like this.
When patch repairing ensure you rake or fork into the existing soil to remove any hard surface or weeds. Add a thin layer of fresh topsoil and rake into the surrounding lawn so that it knits in tightly.
If cutting turf for this patch don't forget the turf could be 25 - 50mm thick so you may need to dig into the area first!
Sow your seed and rake through into the surrounding before giving it a good sprinkling of water.
