Watering the lawns in times of drought;
is currently a necessity as we havent had much if any rain now for some 8 weeks. If you havent already, its time to get the sprinklers out. You can water the flower beds and the lawns all at the same time. The trick to watering lawns to help them stove off a drought situation (where the grass browns off) is to water once per week, but to water until the lawn is flooded. Ideally you will need to keep the tap on, until you have standing water on the surface of the lawn. This will allow the water to seep down to the root system, and not just the top few millimeters or perhaps the top centimetre.
For the grass to benefit from your watering, the moisture must get down to the roots. You can easily check with a garden spade, by opening up a slit in the lawn to see how far the water has managed to get. If the water hasn’t managed to penetrate the soil down to the roots, then you will need to leave the sprinkler on for longer.
By watering just once a week through the dry period, you will most likely keep the grass green and save it from a huge amount of stress. Once the lawns are stressed it is harder to help them to revive them selves. Often people that the lawn is dead when it turns brown, but in reality all that is happening is that the grass plants are going into a survival mode. Where they sacrifice the leaves and stems that are above the soil, to save the root system beneath. The roots will slow down productivity and wait for the rains to come, before they will send new shoots and in turn leaves. This will create dead matter, or thatch that will need to be removed the following spring, or worse, it will create space where weed seeds and moss spores can blow in. Thus reversing all the hard work that is done by our team throughout the spring and previous autumn.
Remember that the lawn is living and it will suffer in times of drought. If the plants need water then the lawn needs it too.
For more advice on watering the lawns, click here