Top Dress Your Lawn For The Perfect Finish

As the days get longer and warmer, it is a terrific time to attend to your lawn in preparation for the Summer holidays. If you have trodden a well worn path to the pool, the front gate, or the clothesline, you may need to attend to compacted areas in your lawn.

Soil compaction caused by continuous traffic (such as walking, cars, kids playing) prevents air getting into the soil and leads to poor lawn growth (no matter how much fertiliser you pour on).

Weeds such as bindii and other broad-leaved weeds can easily take over when this occurs. You can test compaction very simply by pushing a garden fork into the ground.

In a good lawn, the fork should easily go down half way or more. If it doesn’t, the lawn is compacted and needs fixing.

A quick, easy and inexpensive solution is to pave heavy traffic areas (such as the track to the clothesline), where grass will always struggle to grow.

Paving these areas also adds interest to your lawn, and if laid correctly, pavers are easy to mow around.

You can also aerate compacted lawns with a garden fork or a power aerator or coring machine. These can be hired from equipment rental companies relatively inexpensively.

Top dressing

Top dress uneven lawns or lawns with holes. We recommend you consider using river sand, rather than commercial top dressing blends. As well as levelling the lawn, the sand layer under the grass provides excellent drainage.

Always use a lawn leveller to spread the top dressing evenly around the lawn. Quality lawn levellers are available from good hardwares or garden centres for about $100.

After applying the top dressing, always give the lawn at least an hour and a half soaking with a hose or sprinkler. Even better if you can play your cards right, and top dress right before it rains.