Types and composition of lawns in front of the house. The subtleties of soil preparation and sowing, the nuances of care, features of cutting. Step-by-step instructions for creating a summer cottage lawn with your own hands.
A dense and green lawn on the site is one of the hallmarks of a country house. It immediately transforms the appearance of the dacha, gives the courtyard a well-groomed and solid look, creates a feeling of coziness. And if, at the same time, the lawn was also created not by a landscape designer, but by you personally, then, in addition to thinking about the tidy amount saved, the realization that you created this beauty with your own hands warms your soul. Moreover, there is nothing really difficult in sowing a lawn, it only takes patience and diligence.
The main types of lawns
Photo of the lawn on the site
Before sowing a lawn on your site, it is worth deciding exactly how you want to see it, for what purposes you are going to use it. It's one thing if you need a piece of green grass as a worthy setting for alpine slides and flower beds, you don't plan to have picnics on it, put up inflatable pools and walk barefoot - in other words, the lawn should perform a purely decorative function. And it is completely different when a cozy green lawn is required for children to play and for adults to relax.
Different types of lawns serve different purposes:
- Parterre or royal … Difficult to grow, energy-consuming to maintain, and a truly expensive option for green cover, which is solely for viewing from a window or from a walkway. It gives a flawless, dense and dense pile with a uniform thickness of blades of grass and a rich green color, which quickly deteriorates without proper care.
- English … A kind of parterre lawn, less impressive, but more democratic. Needs regular, albeit not so thorough care, can play both a decorative and a practical role.
- Meadow or natural turf … Consists of unpretentious, resistant to trampling herbs, which, nevertheless, look attractive and do not create the impression of chaos. If the lawn includes the seeds of meadow plants such as bent grass, bluegrass or fescue, it is possible to create not just an area of thick grass on the ground, but a real living lawn.
- Mauritanian … Sowing mixtures combine the seeds of traditional lawn grasses and meadow flowers - wild poppies, chamomile, flax, oregano and mint, which look very beautiful in dense greenery. The lawn does not need to be cut as regularly as, say, a parterre or a sports lawn, it looks very picturesque and can serve as a platform for summer picnics and children's games.
- Sports … Ideal for a playground, as it has excellent trampling resistance, recovers quickly and does not require complex maintenance. However, the very arrangement of the lawn is a problem for the novice gardener, since it cannot do without creating a drainage system, and planting requires a much larger amount of seeds than in other cases.
- Lattice or eco-parking … The most "stress-resistant" lawn format, which is used to decorate driveways and parking lots in private houses. The combination of grass and mesh made of high density materials looks impressive and much more attractive than a gravel path or asphalt.
- Ungrass … A stunningly beautiful lawn of ground cover flowering plants, which gradually cover the entire area of the yard allocated for them, leaves few people indifferent. Unfortunately, it is very difficult and time-consuming to grow such a lawn with your own hands, and with the help of a specialist it is expensive, so it is extremely rare. Almost exclusively on the plots of passionate gardeners.
- Mokhovoy … A very special, but rapidly gaining popularity type of coverage for shaded corners of the yard is a moss lawn. Reminiscent of emerald velvet spread across the ground. It practically does not require maintenance, is resistant to frost and heat, protects the soil from erosion, it is pleasant to walk on it barefoot. The whole difficulty lies in buying the right material and settling it on the site, but if you have been thinking for a long time how to make a lawn in your country house, which will not be equal to any of the neighbors, you should try.
- Vertical … A separate type of lawn is grasses intended for growing on the roofs of ecovillages or steep slopes. Their strong roots allow plants to hold onto the soil even in conditions in which other grass would be washed and torn down.
Note! According to another classification, a country lawn can be sown or rolled. The first is sown and germinated, and the second is bought ready-made and rolled out on the ground.
How to choose seeds for a lawn in the country?
There are a number of requirements for the seed used for growing lawn cover, the compliance with which will ensure an excellent result.
The composition of the lawn may include plants:
- Perennial, with a well-developed root system and viable shoots.
- Compatible with each other. Grasses should get along well in the same area, not give the impression of disorder, and in addition, be selected in such a way that at any moment of summer one of them is in the juvenile stage of growth, the most beautiful for visual perception.
- Resistant to fluctuations in temperature and moisture. There are lawn mixtures originally intended by the manufacturer for growing in shady or sunny places, but in general, herbs should not require the creation of special conditions for their existence.
- Resistant to trampling to varying degrees. For example, “titans” of the plant world are used for sports fields - comb, white bent, etc., while the grass for the lawn in the English or meadow style may belong to the more delicate varieties.
- Possessing a bright saturated shade. In this regard, there are no equal to the soft green escaping bent grass, malachite bluegrass and ryegrass - it is not for nothing that they can be found in almost every mixture.
It will be difficult for an inexperienced summer resident to independently select and combine different types of seeds in accordance with all the requirements, therefore, no matter how eager you are to grow a lawn in the country with your own hands, it is advisable to turn to ready-made sets of herbs that have already been compiled for you by professionals. Especially when it comes to a bright Moorish lawn, suggesting the presence of wildflowers, or an elite parterre.
Note! The suspicious cheapness of seeds for the lawn indicates that plants with low decorative and sowing qualities prevail in the mixture. Thin and graceful herbs are more difficult to produce, and therefore their cost is higher. So do not go after an attractive price - pay attention to the composition of the kit and the reputation of the manufacturer.
Instructions for arranging a lawn on the site
So, the decision has been made, the grass seeds for the lawn have been bought … It's time to move on to action. Let's make a reservation right away that it is better to do this in the spring: the grasses planted at the height of summer will not grow well, showing everyone the bald spots in the place of the supposed green cover, and will not have time to get stronger by winter in order to quickly grow in spring. Prepare the site at the end of September-October, and start sowing in April-May.
Soil preparation
The first thing a novice lawn owner should do is choose a suitable piece of land and study its properties. So, excessively moistened soil must be drained, uneven to get rid of pits and bumps, and ideally - to conduct a laboratory study of the composition in order to know exactly what to expect in the future. For example, a limestone soil located under the main fertile layer will significantly complicate your task.
To start sowing the lawn in the spring, in the fall, the selected area is dug up, carefully choosing from the ground weed roots, stones, shards and similar trifles that can spoil the result. You can, of course, affect the weeds with chemical mixtures, but it is better not to contaminate the soil and do all the work by hand, in the end, diligently leveling the area with a rake. Keep in mind: In the spring, the weed control program will have to be repeated, as some of them will germinate anyway as soon as the snow melts.
Nutrients are introduced into the thawed ground, focusing on its composition, or universal mineral and organic fertilizers for the lawn are chosen. Laboratory research will be useful here, as it will be able to show exactly what is missing on the site, but if it is impossible to make an analysis, you can do without it.
If it is decided to bring soil to the dacha to increase the fertility of the soil, you should take care of its compaction by tamping and spilling methods, otherwise after a while the lawn will sag in places, losing its beauty.
Note! You should not use equipment like mini-tractors for ramming, it will compact the soil too much. Use a sand-filled pipe or other handy tool.
Sowing seeds
After the land for the lawn is fully prepared, they begin to sow. The main condition, the observance of which will ensure the absence of excessively thickened grass spots on the site, along with areas of translucent soil, is the uniformity of sowing.
It can be achieved in three ways:
- Mix seeds with a little fine sand to make things easier for yourself;
- Draw out the ground with twines stretched through each meter and measure out a certain amount of seeds for each site;
- Use a dedicated lawn seeder, especially if you need to cultivate a piece of soil over 100 m in size2.
Note! The standard seeding rate is approximately 30-40 g of seeds per 1 m2 land. But you should not buy seeding material exactly to measure, since in the future you may need to thicken some places with an additional portion of seeds, and the grass of a different shade will look ugly on them.
Important:
- Planting the lawn begins from the edge, paying special attention to it.
- Half of the seeds are sown along, and the other half - across the plot.
- They start work in calm, windless weather in order to avoid uncontrolled dispersion of planting material.
Note! In theory, you can plant a lawn both in the spring and in the fall, letting the seeds get out of the snow on their own at the end of March, but in the latter case, you need to be prepared for the fact that you will not get a uniform grass cover in your country house this summer.
Care and watering
When the planting of the lawn is finished, its owner can only wait for the shoots, but it is too early to completely relax - there is still a lot of work ahead.
It is extremely important to ensure that the lawn is properly watered so that the seeds do not suffer from a lack of moisture and do not float in the puddles that form on the site. Watch the weather: dry wind and hot sun rays will be a worthy reason to once again go out to the area with a hose, at the same time making sure that the water jet does not wash crops out of the ground. A special nozzle helps to solve this problem, scattering water in the smallest splashes.
When the first shoots appear, you can equip the lawn with automatic irrigation. However, until the grass is at least 1-1.5 cm long, it is still not worth trusting the automatic care of it.
The first mowing begins much later, when the blades of grass rise 10-12 cm above the ground, after which a standard routine begins with regular mowing every 10-14 days, depending on the growth rate of the plants or the type of lawn. English and sporty are cut more often, Moorish less often. The last time the grass is trimmed so that it goes under the snow, being 3-5 cm tall, in order to protect the rhizomes from frost.
In the fall, fertilizers are applied: nitrogen, mineral, phosphate-potassium. In order not to get into a mess, strictly follow the instructions: the lawn may react badly to exceeding the dosage and not get all the benefits if the feeding is not enough. You should be especially careful with nitrogen fertilizers.
Lawn care also includes:
- Weeding weeds if they manage to break out of the ground along with the seedlings. It is produced as early as possible so that the weed does not have time to firmly intertwine with the roots of the cultivated, and exclusively by hand.
- Use a lawn aerator to provide oxygen to the roots and give the lawn a more well-tended appearance. In extreme cases, the soil can be pierced with a pitchfork.
- Overseeding in case of bald patches.
- Brushing the grass with a rake to remove dry grass.
- Fight shading if mold or moss is present at the roots.
How to make the lawn on the site green, thick and soft without any extra effort? Buy finished goods in rolls. It will cost more, but a spectacular green lawn will appear in your yard, as if by magic. True, the standard preparation of the soil will still have to be done, but after that you just need to roll out the rolls on the site, carefully joining them with each other and laying the joints with mulch.
Unusual solutions for arranging a lawn in the country
Many owners, who are seriously concerned about the aesthetic component of their site, are concerned about how to make the lawn not just fluffy and fresh, but also original, in order to give it and the overall look of a summer house or a country house a zest. Well, a lot of interesting solutions have accumulated at the moment.
To make your summer cottage lawn unique, try:
- Combine long stripes of grass with patches of light colored tiles. They can be given a neat, well-groomed look by constantly trimming overgrown stems, or to achieve the effect of slight neglect, which occurs in an old garden. Looks very romantic!
- To enclose the turf with the grass planted on it in wooden frames that rise 10-15 cm above the ground. Such green "flower beds" on white pebbles look very stylish.
- Lay out labyrinths of small concrete slabs or paving stones in the grass, which romantic people and children will really like.
- Here and there, scatter picturesque boulders on the lawn, giving it the resemblance to a fantasy landscape, a Scottish wasteland or a Japanese rock garden.
- Before planting a lawn, you need to arrange a low hill in the middle of the area designated for this purpose, and when it is braided with grass, fit a round door and a decorative window, imitating a hobbit's dwelling.
- To transform the slope existing in the landscape of the summer house into terraces covered with green grass and reinforced with a wooden frame.
But why should we be guided by other people's ideas? Browse through the photos on the Internet, feel the inspiration and let your imagination run wild! If someone before you came up with how to make a lawn impressive, original and interesting with your own hands, you can do it too. Get started with creativity!
How to make a lawn on the site - watch the video:
