The lawn is not in good shape. Years of poor management – mostly my fault due to insufficiently frequent lawn moaning – have left it in a sorry state. This year, under the “Golden Age of Horticulture” banner I had hoped to improve the situation, but the almost biblical drought has put paid to that. Frequent lawn moaning only helps if there is enough water for the grass to sprout new blades as a result and with a lawn the size of a tennis court watering isn’t really practical or affordable.
At the weekend I moaned at the lawn for the first time in two weeks and only collected about one third of a grass box. Most of the time I could barely see where I had cut.
One of the key problems is a number of persistent bare patches, particularly at the North East end of the garden. Passing one of these today I observed that it seemed rather stony. ‘Perhaps if I clear some of those stones out it will grow a bit better’, I thought, so I started poking at it with a hand fork.
It quickly became clear that the stones were actually set in concrete and I was actually looking at the top of a buried lump. Out came the mattock and a minute’s bashing and levering later it was out.
This is not the first block of concrete I have found buried in the lawn but it is one of the biggest and it is the first for many years.
I filled the hole with a mixture of top soil, compost, lawn fertiliser and lawn seed. Unfortunately, the seed is very old and I am not hopeful so I might need to buy some more.
I can only presume that this block was covered with a thin layer of soil which has slowly worn away. I now wonder whether I should dig into the other bare patches and am concluding that I have little to lose.