Know your Lawn Turf
When you are wandering through a Home Depot or related store checking out the roll-on turf, or even if you play golf and you see great expanses of turf on fairways, in the rough, around bunkers and on the greens, your mind goes into overdrive as you picture this type of turf in your own yards – front and back.
Most enthusiastic, and sometimes inexperienced gardeners, are let down in their attempts to create those beautiful landscaped lawns, because they didn’t check the type of lawn turf that best suits their soil, climate and situation.
Your lawn is like a painting canvas and the frames are the garden beds and landscaped areas. Did you know your lawn absorbs sound, that it produces oxygen, that it attracts and traps dust particles, it prevents soil erosion and helps reduce pollution? Let’s not mention what beautifully kept lawns do for the value of your home.
This is all great news and additional knowledge to some, but only if you have selected the right turf grass in the first place.
When you started designing, creating and landscaping your garden, all your plants and trees were fairly small. As a result, the lawn areas received heaps of sunlight, more than enough, to remain healthy and grow quickly. But after a few years, all those trees and shrubs have grown into fairly healthy specimens themselves. Guess what? The amount of shade they are throwing out is now covering a larger area of your turf lawn.
Too much shade, or lack of sunlight, can cause some issues for the health of your lawn. This will certainly be the case if you did not select a shade tolerant type.
Looking after your lawn
There have been different approaches developed over the years on the best way to look after your lawns and turf grasses. Everybody seems far more environmentally conscious and more aware of inorganic methods compared to the organic approach.
Organic
This method suggests that weed control and fertilisation are best achieved when using organic products only. The organic products we are talking about include corn gluten which can be used as a fertiliser as well as a weed control.
Other aspects of the organic way include teaching the correct watering, mowing and soil management techniques of physical lawn maintenance.
Inorganic
The best lawn care, according to this system is by using herbicide sprays to control weeds. Once you have gotten rid of the pesky weeds, then you can enhance the lawn condition by applying synthetic fertilisers. This is based on the premise that the healthier the lawn then the harder it is for weeds to grow anyway. By maintaining the health of the lawn, just keep up the fertiliser and you only have to pull out the occasional weeds.
Opinion
It’s one for the experts to debate but there seems to be greater success with lawn care using the inorganic method. The lawn seems to look far better with application of herbicide weed killer, practising good lawn care, and using fertiliser. The experts to ask? Green keepers and golf course superintendents.
