What aout you! Today I'm going to show
you a Beginner's Guide on how to Scarify your Lawn - everything you need from
start to finish. We're going to talk about the tools that you need, how to
identify thatch and moss, and I'm going to show you three different ways to
kill the moss in your lawn. Let's go .......... So now we've started into it, and we're cutting the
grass. I get a lot of questions about whether or not you should cut the grass, and what height you
should cut it at. Now dependent on what you're trying to achieve, if you're thinking about
over seeding your lawn then it might be helpful scalping the grass away down. Alternatively, if you're
grass is really long, then you're probably going to want to cut it very short, because it's going
to make it a lot easier to get into with the scarifier. But something that I would say is, if you
really scalp your grass down and you're just scarifying, then it's going to take a lot longer
for the grass to recover. So there's swings and roundabouts to what you do and there's no right
and wrong, it just depends on your own garden. To explain to you why we scarify - I've pulled
this core out of the lawn you can see there's quite a bit of moss on the top of it there, and
whenever we look at the side profile of it, you can see that up the top we have our moss
and our grass, and then this lighter brown layer is known as "thatch", and then we have
our soil. Whenever you have a lot of thatch in your lawn, then it starts to become an
issue. It blocks air, water and light from getting down into the roots. The best way - and
really the only way - to get it out is to scarify it. So scarifying is just taking a tool and
ripping that out, and it just pulls it all out. We've got the grass cut. Our next step
is now to scarify the lawn. I've got a couple of manual tools here that
you can use to scarify your lawn. I'm just going to show you, this is our first
hole we have the manual scarifyer, you can see these blades on it, they're
shaped to the take stuff out. You see the moss and the thatch that's been
pulled out in that very short space of time. So this method works well, these blades pull out,
a lot out. But it's hard work. If you don't have that scarifying rake I just showed you, you
might have one of these here in your shed. These are an old-fashioned type of rake, a bulldog
metal rake, and the teeth on it are really good. A spring tine rake, really good for ripping
out the moss. We'll have a go with this now. To show you quickly - so with the spring back
rake, we only took out a small amount whenever we go up to here, and with this tool, you
can see all the extra material we took out. Nearly triple the amount with this tool as opposed to this one. Tools like this here are perfect for smaller spaces, 50, 100 square meters. Any more than 100 square meters they're probably not going to want to use something like this. You're going to
be looking at an electric scarifier, there's a lot of different electric scarifiers you can buy in around
100 to 200 pounds, but if you have a a bigger lawn then you're probably going to use a tool like
this here. This is actually a professional scarifier. Now you could hire one of these for the
day, they are quite expensive to buy, so the best option is probably to hire it.
You could hire in the blower as well, it's going to make tidying up a lot easier.
So let's go on with the scarifying now. ........ What height do you set the scarifier att? You
just want the blades to tickle the surface. You don't want the blades to go into the
soil, and you want them to go into the grass. Your better to set the scarifier to a high height,
and bring it down slowly, and just test it out yourself. You can always run over it again, what you
don't want to do is you don't want to put holes in your lawn. So if this is your first time scarifying,
just set the scarifier to high height, do a couple of passes and then put it down, and over
time you'll get the experience behind what you need to be taken out or not. But you're better
taking out less, and that way the lawn's gonna recover faster than putting a lot of holes into
your lawn - and perhaps damaging your equipment too! You can see there, we've taken a wee bit out, but not very much so I'm going to put it
down another bit and have another go. There you go. We've done one pass. Now if you had
an electric scarifier, chances are you would want to rake all this up before you went over it again.
As that is a petrol powered scarifier, and it's very powerful, I'm just going to put it down a bit in
height, and I'm gonna go over it again and do it a second time. Let's do that now ................. Now that the lawn is single scarified,
now we're going to do it double. To explain what I mean, we go in one direction then we'll go
the other, so if you if you bring your lines your second line in line with that one you're going to
take out the least amount. Whenever you start going across your cut, so if you're going perpendicular
you're going to take the most out the closer you bring those lines together the less less harsh you
are on the turf. So that's the hardest, and going straight up and down along the same lines that's
the least amount you're going to take out, but whenever you bring those lines together then you
start to be harder on your turf. We have the lawn all scarified, I'm going to show you a couple of tools to clean up. The Bulldog rake that we used to do the scarifying, you can use one of these here, but
it can be slow going. Something that's a lot better is these rakes here. You'll see these rakes in a
lot of my Videos. Now I'm going to show you a wee secret behind how to use them without hurting
your back. You can use these here all day long really, really easy. Now if you want to support the
Channel, I'm going to leave a Link down below, you can pick one of these rakes up on no extra
cost to yourself. So let's start with the raking ........... So the secret to using using these rakes is to keep your back straight
and keep this upright. A lot of people would lean down in, and put that
in, and it's a lot harder to push along or pull along, so if you keep your, you keep your back
straight, this actually flicks the grass up. Now we've got all this lifted we're going to
go up into the workshop and have a chat about the best way to kill moss in your lawn. I'm going
to show you three different ways. Let's go now ........... In the UK there's nothing that you can put on your
lawn that kills moss! How we kill moss in a lawn is we put iron on it, and iron dehydrates it,
and I'm going to show you that shortly. So if you're using an electric scarifier, or if you're
using a manual rake, you might want to put the iron on beforehand and it sits in the surface,
and it's going to burn the surface. However if you watch a lot of my Videos, whenever we're doing
the scarifying we put the iron on afterwards, and why that is, because with the professional tools we're
clearing, we're clearing that moss out of the lawn, and if you think of the grass plant sitting
up, and iron can get right down into the base, because the iron doesn't kill it it just dries it
out, and dehydrates it. If you have a lot of this material here, if you have a big deep bed of thatch
and you're putting the moss controller on the top, well then you're just going to burn it. Now the
downside to doing it afterwards is, you can't seed the lawn at the same time. If you want to seed your
lawn you have to leave a space in between putting the iron on, and then doing your seeding. Show you
the three products that kill moss on your lawn. The first product we have is the liquid iron.
Really good if you have a small space. Measure out what you need and spray it on, the downside
the, with the liquid iron is, it's more expensive. If you want the cheaper option or if you have a bigger
garden, then something that you can't go wrong to a soluble iron. You mix this up in some water, and
then you spray it on, but the key thing, the soluble iron is you need a set of scales. You need to weigh
out exactly what you need. Third method to kill moss on your lawn and it's something really
good - especially if you're just starting out? Is lawn sand. If you want to learn all about lawn sand watch this Video next. I'll
see you over there now ..........................
