Without being a slave to a green sward, we’ve gathered together a few simple Seaside Lawn Care tips. Have a nice patch of grass through the year. It’s a very robust and resilient plant and one of the things that you will be able to grow, even on the seafront.
Whether you start with a patch of rough grass, or with suitable turf, you can make your lawn look lovely with a bit of work each week.
VFC Guide to Seaside Lawn Care
The first tip is to make sure that you select a grass-type for an exposed, marine environment. If you’re laying turf DON’T buy the bowling green varieties – they just won’t grow! If you buy seed from a specialist supplier there’s actually a numbered variety which is especially suited to coastal locations.
Once you’ve got the grass growing, remember that it needs a bit of protection from the salty wind. The best way to do that is to leave the blades of grass a bit longer, especially during the harsh wintery weather. Leave the lawn longer during winter and the blades of grass will burn and catch the worst of the wind, protecting the new growth beneath. As soon as you begin mowing in Spring all of the dead growth will disappear.
Seaside Lawn Care Tip No 1 – Mowing
If you want your lawn to look lovely, you need to mow it about once a week, especially in the growing season.
If you mow less often than that it will grow too long. When you do finally mow it, the grass underneath will be yellow and take a few days to recover once it’s been cut.
If you read the gardening books, experts will tell you to cut it every few days in the height of summer. Depending on how fastidious you are (and how fast your grass grows) you might need to reduce your weekly mowing regime to every 4 or 5 days. But typically one mow a week is enough.
You shouldn’t really ‘scalp’ your grass (cut it very short), because that’s what lets moss in and makes a lawn vulnerable to drought and scorching.
Seaside Lawn Care Tip No 2 – Weed and Feed
Over winter, especially here on the Fylde Coast with the harsh winds, your lawn will probably look a bit pathetic, especially the nearer to the sea that you get. All the rain waterlogging the clay soil doesn’t help either. Trust me, it will recover! Grass is very tough and almost always bounces back.
For a strong, green lawn you’ll need to feed and weed it. Traditionally you’d use a nitrogen-rich food in Spring which feeds the leaves and creates strong, green growth. In Autumn you use a different fertiliser which feeds the roots.
Treatments can be bought as granules or liquids. Granules/powder is easier for a larger area, but usually needs a few days of dry weather followed by rain. Get it from a garden centre or you can get it at big supermarkets with your weekly shop. Buy a feed, weed and moss killer product that does everything in one go.
You need to get your timing right:
- mow the grass at least three days before rain is forecast
- apply your product just before rain is forecast (or be prepared to water it in with a hose).
Apply it according to the instructions and avoid over applying. Put too much on and your lawn will go black. Depending on how much you over-apply it by, you could even kill it. You don’t have to be exact to the grain – having done it for many years I just scatter it by hand like feeding chickens. You can buy a little barrow type applicator on wheels which is ideal for large areas or if you aren’t sure. Some products also come in an applicator carton, which takes a bit of the guesswork away.
It’s a faff and there’s a skill to watching the weather to get it right, but is worth doing. If you’re surrounded by weedy gardens you’ll certainly have them in your lawn, along with moss which strangles the growth. This product will get rid of all the unwanted visitors in your lawn and make it grow thick and strong for weeks to come.
Liquid feeds are probably better suited to small areas – they’re diluted and watered in. Without a special sprayer it’s tedious and heavy work, running around with the watering can!
Seaside Lawn Care Tip No 3 – Raking
After about a fortnight of using a lawn treatment you’ll see visible signs that it’s worked.
Between the blades of grass, you’ll see that the moss has gone dead and black looking against the soil. If you’ve got dandelions and bigger weeds they will start to shrivel up and die. At this point you need either elbow grease or a machine – we’ve got a machine!
Raking with a machine
A lawn rake looks like a lawn mower but it has vicious looking prongs instead of blades. You use it like a lawnmower and it pulls up the thatch (dead grass) and moss into the bucket.
Raking with elbow grease
The old fashioned, manual way of getting all the dead out of your lawn is with a spring rake. That’s the one with the thin and bouncy, fan shape of prongs on the end.
All you do (all!) is apply firm pressure to the rake, across all of the lawn, to pull out the dead grass and dead moss. It’s hard work – depending on how big your lawn is it might be very hard work…
When you’ve finished your lawn will look like it’s been through a hedge backwards (to mix metaphors!). Now give it a mow, then go inside and have a brew and put your feet up!
After a couple of weeks and a spot of rain you’ll be admiring your gorgeous lawn. This is all we do to our lawn, apart from mowing it each week.
If you choose not to use a chemical moss killer you can still rake and aerate your lawn to improve it.
Seaside Lawn Care Tip No 3 – Aerating
If you are really fastidious and really want to be thorough, at this point you should aerate your lawn.
This involves spiking it all over with a digging fork. Just work your way around the lawn, pushing the fork in by about half way and giving it a bit of a wiggle to open up the holes. That’s another hard job – or a work-out depending on how you look at it!
Then top dress it with compost/sharp sand etc depending on what you want to achieve. If you’ve got problems with drainage of standing water, sharp sand would be helpful. With a sweeping brush, push whatever you put on the lawn down into the holes you’ve just made with the fork.
Aerating and top dressing improves drainage and reduces compaction. One benefit of being quite close to the coast is that you get a certain amount of continual top dressing with wind-blown sand. It does improve drainage!
Seaside Lawn Care Tip No 4 – Summer Feed
The fertilising effect of the spring weed and feed will last for many weeks. But eventually the grass will grow with less vigour and start to look less bright green.
At this point it’s ready for another meal, and we’ve discovered another product which is effective and easy to use. ‘Aftercut’ is a dry granular feed which you use, yes, straight after cutting, and you just sprinkle it on.
You don’t have to do the dance of the weather forecast or anything like that, or mix it and apply with a watering can. It’s much easier than most of the other products that are available. You might need to do it a couple of times through the summer, until eventually you are back to autumn and the whole lawn care year starts again.
Don’t worry if there’s a drought in summer and your lawn goes yellow. Once it rains again it will quickly green up as it starts to grow.
If you do use any of these fertiliser/weed killer products, don’t feed the grass to animals for several cuts afterwards. Don’t compost it either, or use it to mulch around plants in borders. There will be residual weedkiller in the clippings – so put it in the green bin.
Alternative Lawn Care Tip No 5 – Organic Feed!
Most of the branded lawn foods tend to be chemical based so you might want to consider a more environmentally friendly alternative. Fish, blood and bone is a good all-round fertiliser as is pelleted chicken manure. If you opt for chicken manure I’d smash the pellets up before applying. Otherwise you’ll get blobs of it all over the lawn as it swells with moisture. They’ll take a while to work down into the turf.
There’s a very old fashioned, but very effective way of getting emerald green grass which will cost you no money at all! Human urine is full of nitrogen and a great grass fertiliser. Dilute it first or it will scorch the grass. But in the olden days of chamber pots people had amazingly green grass – they used to sling the contents out onto the lawn in a morning!
More than 40 years ago, when your editor was a small child, we had a neighbour whose husband used a gerry at night to wee in. In a morning, his wife threw the contents onto the lawn. Their grass was the brightest shade of emerald green! Human urine of course contains urea. Which is widely used as a fertiliser.
I’ve never tried this, but logic says work systematically around the lawn with it. Leave a comment if you do try it, and let us know how you get on!
Lawn Care Tip No 6 – Pet Wee Rings
If you’ve got a dog (especially a female which squats) then there’s a good chance you’ll get burn rings on your lawn where they have had a wee.
Ideally, the best way to counteract this problem is to keep your dog off the grass when it’s doing its business each day. But if you can’t, what then?
If it’s an occasional problem, just throw some water down on the grass as soon as they’ve done it. It will spread the concentrated urine out over a larger area and you shouldn’t get a burn mark.
Otherwise, I’m afraid you’re not going to have a perfect lawn while you’ve got a pet!
Seaside Lawn Care Tip No 7 – Autumn Feed
In a perfect world you should apply an autumn fertiliser while the soil is still warm. I usually forget!
The point of an autumn fertiliser is that it strengthens the roots of your lawn. It makes it more able to withstand the winter weather and then grow away strongly in spring.
Seaside Lawn Care Tip No 8 – Grow a Meadow
This article was originally written years before natural gardening became popular. Now we’re increasingly concerned about the use of chemicals in our own gardens and I’m certainly opting not to. People are also becoming increasingly aware of the need to create habitat and increase biodiversity. One of the ways you can help to do this is to aim for a meadow instead of a bowling green.
Ideal preparation for a meadow is to rotovate your lawn and reseed it with a wildflower meadow mix. Then each year you’d let the plants seed and dry before mowing, leaving the clippings for a while so the seeds have a chance to drop. Then the clippings should be removed to reduce the fertility in the ground.
But you could just experiment with not cutting your lawn. Leaving the sward longer will encourage more insects and in turn birds which feed on them. Wildflowers will move in on their own – or you could plant seeds or native plug plants. For practical purposes you could just cut a path through so it’s easier to walk on, and leave the rest. Let us know how you get on!
While you’re here…
Go to the homepage of the Visit Fylde Coast website for the latest updates.
Love the Fylde Coast? Sign up for your email newsletter. Packed full of interesting things it arrives in your inbox all 52 weeks of the year.
Join us on Facebook at our Visit Fylde Coast Facebook Group and follow us on Twitter @visitFyldeCoast
Plus hundreds of videos to watch on our YouTube channel – from all over the Fylde Coast!
Booking a stay? Pick a safe, clean and legal place to stay, at the very best price. Book with the Visit Fylde Coast and StayBlackpool guide.
