There’s a difference between renovating your lawn by adding new seeds and by starting from square one with new turf. If more than 40 per cent of the grass in your lawn is damaged, you should go with the latter, but if you’re looking at less than 40 per cent of the lawn being damaged or covered with weeds, a good overseeding – that is adding more seeds to your existing grass plants – will be sufficient. In this article, we will focus on renovating your lawn by overseeding. Helping us is Jan Karlsson, Commercial Lawn & Garden Expert at Husqvarna. If he is to give you just one piece of advice it’s to do a soil test - digging up some soil and sending it to a lab for results. Many homeowners skip this step because they don’t know about it. Or because of the cost. But in fact, kicking the renovation off with a soil test is a solid investment.
“If you don’t analyse the soil, you’ll never know what it needs to get better. You might end up fertilising over and over without achieving any results. A soil test will tell you what to do, but also what not to do. It provides you with a cost-effective action plan”, explains Karlsson.
How to do a soil test varies in different parts of the world, but commercial labs generally do it. The lab will provide you with a detailed mode of procedure that will be helpful when you move on with your renovation.
Renovation season varies depending on where in the world you live, but it’s important to make sure that the ground is warm enough for the seeds to germinate and grow. That means that the ground temperature should be at least 10° Celsius.
“One rule is to wait until after the first cut of the season, when the lawn has turned green and you know that it has started to grow,” Karlsson comments.