An asset to your house

For those who want to lay out a fresh lawn, this is the best time to start. Deep digging and leaving the soil as such for a few days kills most of the insects and unwanted weeds. Repeated picking of weeds helps in the long run, observes Satish Narula

LAWN in a house acts as a wide canvas for ‘painting a picture’ of flowers and shrubs. No matter how costly plants you have in your garden, unless your lawn is spick and span, the whole effect is lost. A good lawn provides a pleasant morning barefoot tread, a sunny place for lunch in winters and a delightful evening outside during summers. This is the time when you should act for laying out a lawn.

The charm a lawn provides is all its own. Usually we forget that the grass is also a perennial herb that has all its requirements similar to other growing plants. You can neglect anything in your garden but a lawn.

Before layout, the shape and size of the lawn has to be decided by many factors like the position of the house, availability of water, taste of the owner etc as one may like to have undulations or wavy lines, cutting deep into the lawn to accommodate seasonal flowers, or low statured shrubs.

Paths, edges landscape features like lighting, ponds, placement of rocks and boulders, where space permits, benches, statues etc are some of the other features that are to be taken into consideration before the layout of a lawn. Always keep in mind that no edge, spot, or portions of a lawn should have a feature that hinders free movement. Unmowed portion of the lawn becomes an eyesore and also a breeding place for insects.

For those who want to layout a fresh lawn, this is the best time to start. Deep digging and leaving the soil as such for a few days kills most of the insects and unwanted weeds. Repeated picking of weeds helps in the long run. Visible weeds should be removed and the soil levelled. In the first go you may feel it is levelled, but since the soil is loose, the level is disturbed with rain. It is advised to fill the ground with water. Formation of pools will show the depressions. At the time of the final levelling, a small piece of wooden plank should be used. Make sure that the final levelling is like a table top. Two types of grass are usually planted in this region— the ordinary Calcutta grass and the Korean or Nilgiri grass. Calcutta grass forms an excellent turf. In case of Nilgiri grass, it needs repeated mowing. If at any stage the mowing is missed, it forms tufts and the turf also thickens. Later when the mowing is done it forms yellow and brown patches where the tufts had once been. This is the time when you feel no visitor should come home, last he looks at your lawn. Moreover, you cannot walk on this grass barefoot.

Usually when the lawn is laid out, the grass starts growing. But due to broad distance between planting or due to drying of grass, patches appear. The growth of the grass, especially, on Korean grass, is so slow that it takes months for the grass to first establish itself and then spread to give a complete ground cover. In due course of time the place where actual planting of grass is done forms a tuft. This results in patch forming. Do not wait for nature to form a complete turf. Do it yourself by doing filling in the patches.

For control of broad-leaved weeds the spray of sodium salt helps. The spraying has to be repeated once after 45 days. Do not use other formulations of 2, 4-D as those are volatile and might lead to killing of other plants in the garden. The spraying of weedicide should be done on a calm day keeping the nozzle very near to the ground. No drift should be allowed on the plants in the immediate vicinity.

Repeated mowing keeps the weed population down naturally. Due to repeated cutting of the top portion of weeds, there is lack of ‘food’ formation by weed plants that leads to starving of roots, which die in due course of time.

Remember, a well laid and maintained lawn gives the owner a high degree of respectability.