In addition to various garden weeds, mosses are the most unpopular guests in allotment gardeners’ plots. At least when they spread across the lawn of the property. Mosses have a bad reputation. They are an important part of the ecosystem in many of our world’s landscapes. If they spread across lawns, this is a sure sign that the meadow grasses are hardly getting any nutrients from the soil. For better or worse, they have to leave the field to less demanding plants such as weeds or mosses. For example, mosses get their nutrients from rainwater.
With the rising temperatures, the blades of grass on many properties and in allotment gardens are now waking up from their winter dormancy. But various mosses have often spread across the lawn over the winter. If you don’t feel like doing that, you should thoroughly renovate your meadow. And this is how it works:
If you want to remove the moss from your lawn, you can’t avoid scarifying it. Plucking the moss out of the lawn by hand is not only extremely laborious, but also work that never ends. Electric scarifiers are equipped with small, sharp blades that cut small furrows in the lawn, making it more permeable. The side effect is also extremely useful. The scarifier also catches a lot of thatch made from moss, weeds or grass roots.
Important: You can dispose of moss and other lawn thatch in your own compost. Be sure to mix the green waste with other garden waste beforehand so that it doesn’t clump together.
If you have moss in your lawn, this is a sure sign that the lawn is not receiving enough nutrients. This is usually because the soil is too acidic, i.e. has a pH of 5.5 or less. With a pH soil test you can easily check this within minutes. As a first countermeasure, it is helpful to neutralize the acid in the soil with garden lime. Because doing it by hand is tedious, especially on larger areas, and usually doesn’t work evenly, it’s worth using a spreader to get the right dosage.
Once the meadow is well ventilated again and the soil is neutralized, the stalks need a growth booster. The urgently needed nutrients can only get into the soil with high-quality, organic lawn fertilizer. These are generally significantly less contaminated with heavy metals than mineral fertilizers. Organic fertilizer can also be applied with new or reseeding. A good middle ground could be organic-mineral lawn fertilizers. To keep in mind: Use the grass clippings after the next moat as natural fertilizer. It contains important nutrients that you withhold from the soil when you spread the cuttings on the compost after mowing.
Which brings us directly to the fourth act of lawn renovation. Before new lawn seeds come into play in the final step, you should give the soil a further and, if possible, sustainable boost of nutrients. This is particularly possible with the humus miracle weapon called compost. When incorporated into the soil, the compost acts like organic fertilizer thanks to its humus layer. You can achieve a similar effect with a soil activator, which is applied as granules and brings the microorganisms into the soil in concentrated form.
The fifth and final act is about sowing new lawn seeds and giving the area the necessary density and strength again. Here, too, it is worth taking a gritter to help. If you don’t want to buy it separately, you can rent it and other garden tools from many hardware and garden centers for a fee. It is important that you plant certified seeds if possible. You can recognize this by the label RSM (Regular Seed Mixture), which guarantees that the mixture only contains lawn seeds from first-class grass varieties. Depending on the provider, you should budget around 60 to 80 euros for a lawn area of 200 square meters. This is particularly true: If you buy cheaply, you sow at least twice.
The renovation described is complex and takes time. If you want to avoid having to subject your lawn to such a treatment every year, you should ask yourself why the moss grows at all and start there. Answer A: Moss thrives even in the shade, shaded grass quickly stops growing. Seeds optimized for partial shade can solve the problem. However, if hedges or other obstacles completely block the lawn from sunlight, grass is a hopeless case at this point. Answer B: Blades of grass do need moisture – but in a healthy amount. In the worst case scenario, waterlogging and constant wetness can cause the roots to rot. The cause is usually the overly compacted soil. The only thing that helps here is digging and mixing some sand into the soil, which is much more permeable to water.
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