What does the lawn need in the spring?
Mainly water, some food, mowing and rolling.
· Water, there is always some leftover from winter and spring is generally a fairly rainy season.
· Much of the food is already in the ground, but it is good to supplement.
Every 2 or 3 years on young lawns, topdressing is interesting in heavy and rather dry soils. This operation provides additional organic matter which allows the soil to better retain water and nutrients.
You can also bring a little fertilizer under with a balance* 2.1.1 preferably of organic origin but if the soil is well supplied with organic matter, a mineral fertilizer may be suitable.
WARNING: take care to spread this fertilizer after a rain so that it can integrate well into the soil without being washed away.
· The 1st mowing is generally done in March in the plains of our region.
It is advisable to raise the deck slightly (cutting height) so as to take account of ground movements that occur in winter.
And finally a good ride,
Used both to tiller the grasses, ie to prevent them from growing too high and to level the irregularities of the ground which have occurred in winter due to frost, passages or a few animals.
Slightly intense periods of frost sometimes raise the ground. Rolling puts it all back in place and re-establishes contact between the soil particles and the roots.
– Robin Smith
What do we do it with?
A simple smooth roller does the trick. It was not that it was too light, a manual roller and rarely too heavy. You should know that the weight of the roller, which may seem heavy when you try to lift it, is in fact distributed over the entire surface in contact with the ground.
A roller of 20 kg and 40 cm wide exerts on the ground only a pressure of 100 to 200 grams per cm² (approximately 4 times less than a shoe).
The best time to roll a lawn is after the first or second mowing provided the ground is not soggy, in which case it would be a bad operation.
– Paul Mansfield photography
*Balance of a fertilizer:
By convention, fertilizers are labeled with 3 numbers which, in an immutable order, represent:
1. Nitrogen (N)
2. Phosphorus (P2O5)
3. Potash (K2O)
The other mineral elements such as magnesium, sulfur are mentioned next with their chemical symbols. Eventually also appear the trace elements when there are some.
Trace elements are elements that exist in the soil in very small quantities.
The balance of a fertilizer is the ratio between the main elements of this fertilizer. Phosphorus is always taken as a unit. Thus a 20-10-10 fertilizer has a balance of 2-1-1, the numbers of 20;10;10 indicate the % by weight of each element contained in the bag.
Example: for a 10 kg fertilizer bag of 20-10-10, there are 2 kg of nitrogen, 1 kg of phosphorus, 1 kg of potassium. The rest of the weight of the bag is made up of elements combined with mineral elements such as hydrogen, oxygen, sulphates or chlorides, mainly calcium.
Ask all your questions during the gardening program on Sunday morning on France bleu Isère from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. by calling 04 76 46 45 45.