Watering Lawns in the Summer

Our customer base seems to be very divided as to whether they like to water their lawns over the summer months. Of course, if you wish your lawn to stay green in a dry summer, then water is the only answer.

To keep your lawn looking green and healthy, the trick with watering lawns is always to give the lawn a good soaking when you do it. You need to allow the water to penetrate down into the soil and encourage deeper roots so if it has been dry for a little while you will need to run the sprinkler for quite some time. It is always best to water in the evening or during the night if you have a controllable irrigation system installed.

Grass plants are in fact amazingly resilient and simply go yellow and dormant waiting for enough water to start growing again. Encouragingly, even after the terrible drought in 2006 (and the hose pipe ban) lawns did green up as soon as the heavens helped us out with some proper rain, but they develop thatch which is the yellow colour that you see in drought conditions, and look a little scruffy whilst they are in their recovery phase.

During the autumn season, we like to scarify the lawns that we look after which have been badly damaged by drought and then do a little over seeding where the plants look like they are going to struggle to recover.

Top Tip: Watering little and often is not good for the lawn as this makes the plants think that water will be readily available and so encourages shallow roots.