Top Dressing a lawn
Introduction
Top dressing your lawn is a crucial part of your seasonal lawn care routine. If you are not top dressing your lawn seasonally then you are missing out on a lot of growth and it also helps to reduce the risk of disease and invasion of weeds. Top dressing is essential to keep your lawn looking vibrant all year round.
Before you rush off to your nearest lawn care shop, there are a few things to keep in mind to ensure your top dressing is effective and doesn't end up, in extreme circumstances, killing your lawn. Top dressing will transform your lawn from being brown and dreary to green and lively.
What is top dressing?
Top dressing is the practice of adding a light layer of composed organic matter and sand on your turf. This avoids the need for synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and is a sustainable way to keep your holmes lawn healthy and thriving. Whilst this is also an accepted practice you can top dress to achieve a luscious healthy lawn, or you could use a combination of the two.
The addition of sand to the top dressing mix does not provide any nutrients to the mixture however it is key in allowing for aeration and drainage of your soil and the grasses root system. Nutrients can be added to the sand mixture if deemed necessary.
Why top dress?
To ensure that your lawn is fed enough nutrients to allow it to grow lush and evenly, topdressing is essential and will enable you to use your grass all year round for your desired purposes. Topdressing will increase the lawn's nutrients, strength and make the grass more resilient, improve drainage, promote root growth and make grass greener.
What Materials to use?
A tip for selecting top dressing materials is to keep the composition and consistency of the materials similar to the soil composition of your lawn. The best materials to use are sand, finely screened compost, topsoil or a combination of these options.
Sand can have many uses when topdressing, it is good at leveling uneven lawns and will help aerate thicker clar soils which will improve drainage and loosen soil density. It is usually recommended that yellow sand is used for top dressing which can be seen used on golf courses and man made and maintained areas.
Compost is the most nutrient rich top dressing soil for your lawn. Compost is packed full of nutrients that your lawn needs to thrive.A tip when using compost for top dressing is to ensure that the compost is ‘finished’ and it has fillers mixed in. To ensure that your compost is finished, check that it has a similar consistency to your soil, if not it needs to be left for a bit longer. Compost will help improve poor soil and also help sandy soil retain nutrients.
Topsoil is a quick and easy option and has a similar consistency to planting soil. Topsoil may not have enough nutrients needed for your turf to reach its full potential so some compost may need to be mixed in to ensure your topdressing mixture is nutrient rich.
How much?
Only a fine layer of top dressing material is neede for a typical healthy lawn. This will mean between 0.3cm and 1.0cm will be enough, you may need to go a bit thicker on there is a less healthy part of your lawn.
Conclusion
Topdressing is essential to keep your lawn healthy and thriving all year round. Prior to applying topsoil, make sure that you prep your turf by aerating (raking or hiring an aerator to separate the thatch) and mow your lawn. Once you have spread your topsoil, ensure to rake it in.
