Lawn—Adore Or Abhor

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31716, 27 June 1968, Page 13

Lawn—Adore Or Abhor

As most gardeners know, a well-groomed lawn can be one of the most pleasant—or one of the most tyrannical of garden features.

A good green lawn exacts its price in gardening time; it demands regular mowing, edging, watering, raking, weeding and fertilising. If these needs are not met, a lawn has a spiteful way of exposing the lax gardener to his neighbour by turning brown. sprouting weeds, or looking generally shaggy and woebegone.

Not every lawn is as attractive as it should or could be. Gardeners who have most success with their lawn are those who first give careful thought to planning a lawn that suited their location and needs and thereafter followed sensible practice in keeping it ship-shape.

vesting brings in many foreign seeds. The array of devices available on the market at present has made the task of lawn weeding, which formerly was drudgery, almost a sport. A choice of appliances which squirt, spray, sprinkle, douse or dust offending weeds with a press of a trigger. Though there still exists a few holdout weeds which remained unimpressed by this arsenal and that must be eradicated by the old-fashioned flnger-and-tug method, the bulk of weeds can be disposed of simply and neatly by applicators.

A lawn that maintains a green hue throughout the dry summer months has been well irrigated. Watering of a lawn is something that has to be studied; if the soil is sandy, water can be poured on it and it will disappear immediately; conversely with heavy soils, water can be poured on at a faster rate than it can be absorbed. If we always grew only what we thought we sowed originally in a lawn, the whole business of lawn keeping would be much easier. One is the difficulties in obtaining pure lawn is caused by the presence of dormant weed seeds, which are generally in abundance in most lawn beds, and which are brought to fruition with the nurture intended for grass seeds. Also it is impossible for a batch of lawn seed to be 100 per cent pure as har-