Fertilize, water, mow, cut edges: A beautiful lawn requires a lot of care. With these simple tricks, the green carpet is easy to maintain.
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There are two types of garden owners: Firstly, the fan of English lawn, for whom mowing the lawn means meditation and who goes out every day with grass shears, weed cutters and garden hose. And on the other hand, the one who simply wants a well-kept green area, with as little effort as possible.
This is quite possible if you take a few points into account when designing the system: The lawn should form an area that is as closed as possible. Avoid angled edges and narrow spaces, because then you can mow in straight paths – this saves time and the area is also suitable for use with a robotic lawnmower. Enclose the lawn with edging stones, steel rails or similar and separate it cleanly from the beds so that you do not have to shape the edge several times a year with trimmers, grass shears and lawn edger. If you carefully remove all weeds before sowing, you don’t have to keep the unwanted plants in check afterwards.
High quality seeds
When creating a new lawn, be sure to use quality seeds from well-known manufacturers such as Compo or Wolf Garten. It should correspond to later use, because pure decorative turf, play turf and shadow turf differ significantly in their composition. The seeds also have a major influence on the later lawn look: high-quality mixtures germinate evenly and grow nicely dense instead of quickly rising. You can often find inexpensive lawn mixtures on the market. Behind it are cheap mixtures of grasses that germinate quickly, but grow much too quickly and do not form a dense turf. The patchy spots are then more or less quickly penetrated by lawn weeds such as white clover and dandelion.
A green carpet that deserves the “English lawn” seal looks good, but is not a hard-wearing playing field. Ornamental lawn mainly consists of fine-leaved types of grass such as ostrich grass (Agrostis) and red fescue (Festuca rubra). It must not be subjected to too much stress and requires a lot of maintenance. For example, it should be cut with a cylinder mower twice a week. Common lawn contains a lot of rye grass (Lolium perenne) and meadow panicle (Poa pratensis). These mixtures are more resilient and require less maintenance. There are also special variants, for example for shady locations – but here too caution is advised, because in really shady places you will not be happy in the long run even with the apparently suitable seed mixtures, because grasses are basically sun worshipers. Instead, planting from shady ground cover is recommended.
Automate lawn care
In order for the lawn to grow nicely, it must be fertilized, watered when dry and cut regularly. Here you can save a lot of maintenance with the use of appropriate technology. You can automate the water supply to a large extent: A permanently installed irrigation system reliably waters the entire area. With the use of an irrigation computer with soil moisture sensors, you don’t even have to turn on the tap. Smart irrigation computers can even evaluate current weather data – if rain is expected, the line is automatically closed.
A robotic lawnmower can do the job of mowing the lawn. It always keeps the green carpet nice and short – this makes it grow dense and the weeds in the lawn are left out. The robotic lawnmowers even know when to disengage because they adapt their mowing times to the growth of your lawn. To do this, they measure the resistance that the grasses put up against the rotating knives. If you have a garden with slopes or narrow passages, the robotic lawnmower also masters these and the touch-up with the hand lawnmower is no longer necessary. On the other hand, you can watch the quiet, busy helper at work from the deck chair and give him new commands via the app if necessary.
Lawn edges made of steel
A lawn not only grows in height, but also in width. The grasses in the edge area slowly but steadily form runners, which then spread out in the flower beds. That’s why you have to show the lawn edge its limits again and again. Steel lawn edges are durable, stable and, depending on the installation depth, almost invisible. They significantly simplify lawn care in the long term. Sections of any length can be assembled from sections and curves can also be formed. The steel edges are either buried or driven into the ground at ground level using a plastic hammer. Paved lawn edges are an alternative. At the same time, they form a fixed lane for the lawn mower. But they also appear more massive, which must be taken into account when designing.
