In spring It’s easy to have a great lawn. Mid-summer is a different story.

My good luck (as far as the lawn is concerned) is the bouts of rainy weather we’ve been having. My good management has been taking a tip from a lawn professional. The game changing tip is surfactant. The reason why patches of my lawn has been browning off every summer is thatch. Thatch does what it does on a thatched roof. It sheds water.

No matter how much I watered there was none getting through to the soil. This was despite dethatching. (Running through with a machine that's a like a rotary hoe but only rips up matted stems). Even coring (removing cores of soil to give water somewhere to soak through) didn't solve my browning-off problems. Before our most recent days of rain I could tell that I had beaten the scourge of brown patches. Applying Surfactant made the thatch permeable. It was the magic bullet.

The lawn is looking splendid. Along with show stopping dahlias and roses, the Eyebright garden is well worth a visit.

Creating a Great Lawn