Your beautifully manicured lawn may lose its shine if you do not maintain it well. Timely topdressing of the lawn is one of the most important aspects of maintaining the look of your lawn.
If you apply topdresser regularly then you can get following few benefits:
- Can maintain proper level on lawn surface
- Prevent any thatch build up
- Drainage improves
- Also, improves lawn fertility
- Promotes new grass growth
- Improves soil structure
- Improves resilience of your lawn
Materials used for top-dressing of lawn
Following are 3 most common materials that must be used for top-dressing of your lawn:
- Sand
- Peat
- Loam
In case, your lawn is highly sandy then during dry climate your lawn may suffer drought and hence by adding little peat-based dressing can help in improving the drought resistance.
Also, as an alternate, by doing sand-based dressing, you can improve the drainage of your wet lawn.
Why top dressing is needed?
Basic truth is, even best soil of the world may degrade over a period of time if no organic matter or fertilizer is added. Fertilizer is essentially consisting of minerals and also contains little amount of humus which is decomposed organic matter.
Generally, we are habituated in depending on fertilizer for maintaining the soil quality for our lawns, which eventually leads to getting “mineralized” soil.
In mineralized soil, minerals are there but humus is absent. Soil will become hard without organic matter and grass roots may suffocate.
Adding compost improves organic matter in the soil, and hence it will also fertilize the grass too. So, as long as you will leave grass clipping on your lawn, it will not be essential to add additional fertilizer.
You must always follow topdressing with application of very top-quality seeds of grass with added little white clover seeds.
Usually, weeds will tend to settle on those areas where grass will be thin, but with regular over-sowing with quality product, you can create very dense resistant of grass mixture and clover where your weeds will have little trouble in sprouting.
Hence, they will remain very few and also far between.
Best time to do lawn top dressing
Lawns can always be top dressed almost anytime when grass growth can be seen which is between the months of April to October. This task is traditionally carried out mostly during late spring or early autumn.
However, you can carry out during any time during summer when the conditions are most favourable.
