 In wet weather, lawns continue to take the brunt of excess water build up – increasingly so in urban areas where natural flood reservoirs are being reduced in size. Snow and frost add dramatically to the amounts of water that lawns are expected to deal with and pose numerous problems for the amateur gardener and professional alike.
Lawns that are waterlogged will squelch when walked upon. You should, at all costs, avoid walking on a waterlogged lawn. Overtime and if the problem is not solved, the lawn will turn yellow and die. Roots will suffocate as the waterlogging prevents air from penetrating the soil. For advice on seeding and laying a new lawn, please see the New Lawns article. Clay soils will be particularly susceptible to waterlogging as the moisture will not drain from the site through this medium.
To combat waterlogging, you will need to manually slit or spike the lawn to a depth of between 1 and 6 inches deep. The holes left by this process can be filled with a free-draining medium such as lawn top dressing, sand or multipurpose compost. Hand spiking tools are available, as are spiking shoes and powered devices too – similar in stature to lawnmowers. A hollow tiner is useful as it extracts tubes of soil from the lawn, which can then be replaced with appropriate matter to encourage drainage. This pricking of the lawn is best conducted after the excess water has drained from the site, especially where powered devices are to be used. If this cannot be achieved and the problem will not alleviate itself first, you may be forced to sweep the water off into the borders, before spiking using a hand tool or a garden fork.
I always use a fork for this task, but is imperative that the work is not carried out in the summer when soil is dry, as you will jar your wrist spiking the lawn, due to the compacted and dry nature of the sub-soil. Instead, in areas prone to waterlogging, you may like to spike the lawn every autumn if it is small, or every few years on larger plots. This will reduce the need for emergency treatments in wet conditions or after heavy rainfall.
In the spring, fertilizer should be applied to encourage good root growth. Those rich in phosphorus are best for this role. Wet spots will encourage moss, so ensure that the lawn is appropriately and regularly scarified. In the worst cases, when the waterlogging becomes a severed problem or hindrance to through traffic, you should consider the need to replace the entire lawn on a 2inch bed of sharp sand, covered with 8cm of topsoil and organic matter. This should improve long term drainage of the site. |
