Help Your Lawn Last The Winter*

Winter is a time of year where all we want to do is wrap up in our cosiest clothing and sit in front of the fire with an abundance of festive films. Thinking about the health of our gardens and specifically, our lawns is usually something that’s forgotten about until springtime rolls around, when we realise how much our lawns have deteriorated throughout the colder months due to a lack of care.

Fortunately, winter lawn care doesn’t have to take up much time for it to have a positive effect on the look and feel of your grass at this time of year. Here are some simple winter lawn care tips to help your lawn survive the winter and look its best…

Collect leaves

The easiest and arguably most important job of all is to pick up any leaves from the surface of your lawn. Although fallen leaves may look festive, our lawns need as much sunlight and ventilation as possible in the winter to survive and stay healthy. Leaving fallen leaves to sit on the surface of your lawn and pile up will lead to the blockage of important sunlight, as well as prevent sufficient air ventilation. Like any living thing, our lawns need to breathe, so failing to pick up leaves and debris on a regular basis can lead to a range of issues like moss or fungal diseases from occurring and spreading.

Why not get everyone involved and make your leaf collecting into a game for the whole family of who can pick up the most leaves or who can collect the most different coloured leaves? There are plenty of ways to make winter lawn care fun.

Professional lawn treatments

To stay in ultimate health all year round, lawns ideally need four professional treatments to prepare them for each season’s challenges. Greensleeves are professional lawn treatment experts, who offer customers core seasonal treatments five times a year. Each treatment is specialised using industry-leading products such as lawn feeds and seeds to make sure your lawn is the envy of your neighbours all year round.

Booking in for a professional winter lawn treatment means you can rest easy knowing that your lawn has been treated using the best tools and products to help it survive even the harshest of winter conditions.

Keep on mowing

While it might be tempting to put your lawnmower away for the winter, your lawn doesn’t stop growing as soon as the colder temperatures hit. It’s important to keep mowing your lawn as often as required to allow healthy growth to continue. Try to pick a day that is mild and dry and only mow your lawn once the morning’s frost has melted to avoid breakages.

It’s best to heighten your mower slightly to avoid cutting your grass too short and leaving it vulnerable to the elements – aim to not cut your grass any lower than 2.5cm at this time of year. Another key tip is to make sure your mower’s blades are sharp enough to slice through your blades of grass without damaging or tearing it in the process.

Aeration

To go one step further than leaf collecting and regular mowing, aerating your lawn is another winter lawn care task that should be ticked off where possible. Whether you have an aeration machine or not, you can use a rake to spike small holes into the soil at regular intervals across the surface of your lawn. Aeration is aptly named, as it allows air to flow more freely among your soil. Over time and particularly in high-traffic seasons like summer, the soil under our lawns can become compact due to the increased footfall. If your soil is left compacted over winter, water, nutrients and oxygen will be unable to be absorbed and won’t reach the roots of your grass to give them what they need.

If you’ve noticed during periods of heavy rainfall that water is failing to drain into your soil efficiently and there are pools or puddles forming, this is a good indicator that your lawn needs aerating.

Composting

Finally, another winter task to add to your to-do list is to keep on top of your compost heap. Compost heaps can be kept alive and active even at the coldest times of the year with the right care, attention and materials to enable them to thrive. As well as topping up your pile regularly with a mixture of dry, moist and insulating materials like fallen leaves or straw, you will also need to mix and turn your pile.