moss in the lawn

HelpMeMove

Is moss such a bad thing? The lawn in our new house feels like a thick sponge (quite like it) and its a large garden.

Jony

it depends what you want from a lawn, if you want a nice green proper lawn then yes it is a bad thing, if you dont care than not really obviously

Lord_Gardener

Scarify (rake) and aerate does the trick. Raking with a wire rake does the job well or buy an electric/petrol scarifier or you can get kits to convert old electric cylinder mowers (Qualcast?) to do the work for you eg

http://home-garden.search.ebay.co.uk/scarifier_Power-Tools-Equipment_W0QQsacatZ29518

We got an old Qualcast from Freecycle a few years ago and a cheap kit from Ebay - does a great job. The moss/thatch makes great compost too!

maple41

If you can afford it Greenthumb are good. But they seem to put (in my opinion) too much fertiliser on over the summer. Lawn looks good but I had to cut it twice every week so didn't have they come the next year. Moss is back in patches though. The cheapest way to kill moss for a seson is get some iron sulphate for the garden centre. This is what they put in lawn sand. You just sprinkle a little bit directly on the moss - on a very still day or else it gets blown everywhere. Next day moss is black. Then rake it out.

Jony

those electric things are rubbish to be honest, unless its already in good thatch free condition and you do it each year to stop it from building up, doesnt get very deep, compare one to what the experts use like i think its the camon? one, they had HUGE blades on compared my attatchment thing. and never had much trouble with GT, yes the lawn grows more because its fertilized, once a week was always fine with me.

squeaky

I've tried a few different moss killers over the years and, quite frankly, found their performance to be miserable. One even seemed to make the problem worse!


My garden runs pretty much northwards from my house (just a bit west of north) and on the left hand side as you look down it I have a line of tress that are planted alongside the slip road which joins a passing dual carriageway.

So the sun rises over the top of my house, which means that much of the garden isn't in full sun until 10am.

The sun then swings round to the left and by mid day those trees have started to shade the left hand side of my garden.

By 2:30 my garden is in full shade.

As the trees have grown over the years my garden has become ever more shaded and moss in the lawn got to the point where the left had side of it was not a lawn but a moss.

The autumn before last, actually mid September, I raked as much of the moss off as I could. Stopped watering the lawn. Stopped mowing it too.

I didn't cut the grass again until mid April.

This meant that the foot high grass shaded out the moss and, of course, was more competition for any rainfall we had too.

I had to strim it first, then cut it with the blades set as high as they would go, and finally cut it with the blade set as low as I could get it.

There wasn't a great deal of moss showing in comparison to the previous year- but there was still actually a fair amount.

Throughtought the summer I mowed the lawn weekly with the cutter kept low, and never watered it. Sure the grass dried out in high summer - but grass can cope, honest - it just doesn't look pretty.

Again I stopped cutting in Sept and didn't start again until late April.

As of this moment there is no evidence of moss anywhere at all.

The current bout of rain is the first real water of the year so the next couple of weeks will tell me if I've won - but all I can see now is bare ground where the moss used to be. So now looks like the best time for me to seed those bits and, hopefully choke and dry out any remaining moss for good.

So as long as you don't mind a badly affected lawn looking pretty rubbish for a year....