The Grass Roots & Lawn Care
The grass roots of lawn care are the grass roots! Without a healthy and strong root system your lawn will simply not survive the stresses and strains an average lawn has to endure each and every year. How do you encourage the roots to grow? How do you protect the roots? So many questions arise when we actually take the time to learn just a little about the root system of our lawn.
The most important aspect to remember about a lawn is that it is a collection of plants rather than one individual plant. Each plant has specific needs and requirements to grow well and remain healthy and, like all plants, this means that it needs plenty of good strong and fibrous roots (like those shown in the photograph above).
Grass roots require nutriments, air, water, light and warmth to grow well but too much, or equally too little, and disaster can strike at a moments notice. To encourage a healthy root system the correct amount of each element should be made available to each and every plant in the lawn, otherwise the lawn will appear patchy and uneven. Throughout this section (of the lawn care section) I will be looking at some additional hints and tips that will help you to keep your lawn healthy and strong and key to this is the grass roots so here is where I shall start.
Firstly you should water little! Watering your garden lawn too often could cause over watering but mostly it will make water far too readily available. This will create short grass roots which do not grow down deep into the soil. Short roots will create a situation where the slightest deviance from your watering regime can cause damage and during times of drought, when hoses and sprinklers are most likely banned, is when your lawn will suffer most as the roots will simply be too short to dig down deep into damper soil to extract the required moisture. It is far better to leave it a while between each watering to encourage the roots of the grass to grow deeper into the soil.
I learnt this simple rule the hard way. I live in a rather damp area where it tends to rain rather often and while this saves me the bother of watering my garden so often it can cause a number of problems. During any periods of prolonged dry and warm weather I would always water my garden and also, at the same time, the lawn. I have a rather large number of trees and shrubs, in my small garden, which tend to suck up most of the water quickly so, after one very long period of dryness, and a hosepipe ban, I decided my lawn was looking rather brown because of the tree roots and it did not enter my head that it was actually the poor quality grass roots that were the real cause.
Now, when I water my garden, I usually leave the lawn well alone. Only during very long extended periods of extreme dry weather do I water my lawn and now the only time it looks brown is when I leave it too long between cuts - when I only have myself to blame. This summer (2008) we had the longest dry period since records began and my lawn remained green throughout. I was so pleased and this success could only be put down to my recent learning about the grass roots.
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