Charlie Albone: The few basic treatments that will make your lawn look great

With the recent sunshine Perth has been enjoying, now is the time to give your lawn a full renovation to get it looking better than it ever has. An afternoon worth of work will revitalise your grass, giving you a lush green carpet for you and your family to enjoy and your neighbours to be green with envy over.

The first step is to get the weeds out of it, and for singular weeds hand-pulling works best.

For infestations, even if they are small, it’s a good idea to spray them with a herbicide. Weeds like creeping clover and bindii will easily spread, especially after a lawn renovation, so you want to ensure they’re gone before doing anything else. Broad leaf herbicides are safe to use on fine leaf grasses such as couch and will target only the weeds with a broad leaf, such as clover. If you have these weeds in a buffalo-type grass, you need a specific herbicide, such as Javelin, that has been formulated to work on just the broad leaf weeds while leaving your buffalo alone.

If spraying out your weeds, it needs to be done two weeks before your lawn renovation to ensure the weeds are completely dead. Skipping this step may seem like a time-saver but it will cost you in the long run and spread the weeds further across your turf.

The next two steps can be done in either/or order and they are scalping and aerating.

Personally, I like to scalp first. This is the process of cutting your grass as low as possible, removing, depending on the variety, the majority of the foliage from the plant.

If you grow a grass that regenerates from the soil, such as a couch or my TifTuf hybrid Bermuda, then you can go as low as the dirt. If you grow a grass that regenerates from stolons or runners on the surface, you want to protect these but take off all the foliage above it.

For this you will need a powerful lawnmower. Your average battery-powered mower won’t do the trick, though some of the upmarket ones might be able to. A petrol-powered mower should be able to handle the average lawn.

By removing the majority or all of the foliage you are removing the build-up of dead leaves, known as thatch — this will prevent any fungal issues from progressing into summer. A hard cut is also excellent for revitalising the plant’s growth habit, forcing it to put out fresh new leaves and freeing up the space for it to grow into.

Aerating your soil is next and this is the process of decompacting the soil and putting air back into it — which lawn grasses love.

A simple garden fork will give you a good workout as you plunge it deep into the soil and wiggle it around again and again. . . and again. Or, hiring an aerator makes for an easy job as you walk behind it like a lawnmower. The machine forces tines into the ground below, coring it and removing small cylinders of dirt. If you have a large lawn there are contractors with machines that shoot water jets down into the soil to create pockets of air — but these are only really cost-effective on larger properties.

Rake all the debris up and remove it from the surface of the lawn. It can be added to compost piles or thrown away.

The next step is to top-dress with a sand. Your local landscape supplier will have something just for top-dressing freshly renovated lawns.

The purpose of top-dressing is twofold. Firstly, it will fill all those holes, so they don’t collapse in on themselves yet maintain the airflow around the grass’s root zone. Secondly, it allows you to smooth out the top of your lawn, giving you a bowling green-smooth surface.

To spread the sand, take a square-mouth shovel and cast the sand far and wide, then take a soil spreader and rub the surface of the grass to give a flat and even surface. I would then apply a granulated wetting agent evenly over the whole surface of the renovated area, as this will ensure when irrigation is applied it soaks evenly and thoroughly into the ground below.

Your lawn is only days away from bursting into life, so you need to apply a slow-release granulated fertiliser specific for lawns. This fertiliser will have all the nutrients your grass needs but be slightly higher in nitrogen to promote and maintain healthy foliage growth. Spread this as per the instructions on the individual packet; adding more won’t make your grass grow back quicker, it will just waste your money!

The last part of the process is watering and your lawn will need plenty to come back quickly.

In the first instance you’ll need to wet the ground, around 25mm of irrigation, then the grass needs to be kept moist but not waterlogged. Little and often is best for a recovering lawn (established lawns should get a heavy water less often) and then trust the process! Your lawn won’t be looking good for at least four to six weeks but with regular mowing after this, you will have the best lawn in the street.