
Gardeners urged to not cut their grass if they want lawns to be thick & green all summer long – plus best height to mow
A LAWN can make or break a garden in terms of how good it looks.
And in the summer months, it can be hard to keep it from drying out and looking patchy.
1
Fortunately, garden experts have shared three tips to get it looking its best and there's one job that is essential.
While summer officially starts from June 21, July is when the peak season starts, so it's important to get your lawn ready now.
The hot weather, wind and lack of rain can put pressure on your lawn and cause it to die off and thin out.
While you may not be able to control the weather, you can control how you care for and prepare your lawn, so it survives in these tough conditions.
Experts at New Garden have shared several tips that 'will have you seeing green in July'.
Grass growth can slow down and stop entirely due to the stress of summer, so the experts have a tip to counteract it.
The lawn pros have urged gardeners to raise their mower height as a 'priority' to help with this if they want to improve the health of their grass.
They claimed: 'The longer you leave your lawn when you cut, the greener and healthier it will be.
'A good height for lawns is three and a half to four inches'.
To adjust the height, measure from a hard, flat surface like the driveway or pathway to the bottom of the mower blade and adjust the height accordingly.
The four easy steps to get your tired lawn lush for summer & you don't need to worry about pigeons ruining it either
Also, be sure to sharpen your mower blades regularly to prevent damage to the grass when cutting it down.
The experts also suggest skipping fertiliser and using iron instead, as fertiliser can burn your grass in summer.
This will 'give you a short-term green-up without the risk of overfeeding'.
It is available in liquid and granular form.
Always apply according to package directions for maximum effectiveness and safety.
Whether you choose a liquid or granular form of iron, keep it off of walkways or patios as it can stain.
As a third option, gardeners can apply lime to their lawn. Often, lawns have a low pH, which means there could be nutrients in the soil that the grass can't use.
Applying lime 'makes those nutrients available to make the grass greener'.

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
British stealth fighter jet stranded in India for over a week
An £88 million Royal Navy fighter jet has been stranded at an airport in southern India for over a week after it ran into trouble in the Arabian Sea. A Royal Navy F-35B Lightning, the world's most advanced and expensive fighter jet, made an emergency landing on June 14. The fifth-generation stealth fighter, part of the HMS Prince of Wales Carrier Strike Group, was carrying out military drills with the Indian Navy earlier in the week. The Telegraph understands that the aircraft was unable to return to the carrier due to poor weather conditions. The pilot issued a distress signal at around 9pm local time last Saturday, triggering a full emergency protocol at Thiruvananthapuram airport, India media reported. Flight tracking data showed the US-designed aircraft landing safely half an hour later at the airport, which is Kerala's second busiest. According to Indian media reports, it then suffered a hydraulic failure. 'It was undertaking routine flying outside [the] Indian Air Defence Identification Zone with Thiruvananthapuram [airport] earmarked as the emergency recovery airfield,' India's air force said in a statement. A maintenance team from the HMS Prince of Wales later arrived, but was unable to repair the F-35B's issue. A larger team from the UK is expected to travel to Kerala to assist in the technical work. For now, the jet, which has sparked a wave of interest inside India, remains parked in the open at the airport under the protection of local Indian authorities, with British personnel overseeing its recovery. It is not yet known how long it will take until the aircraft is operational again, defence sources said. Images taken at the airport over the past week show the slick grey fighter jet parked in an isolated bay with a small number of armed guards stationed around it. Questions have been raised as to how secure the prized military asset is, after an image emerged of just one Indian soldier in a high-visibility jacket standing in front of the jet, holding a gun. However, the Royal Navy reportedly rejected Air India's offer to allocate hangar space to the aircraft due to concerns that other people could access and assess the advanced technologies on the jet. If the second attempt to repair the jet fails, defence sources told ANI news agency that plans are in place to transport the fighter back to its home base aboard a military cargo aircraft. The F-35 Lightning is Britain's frontline stealth fighter that forms part of the core offensive capabilities of the Royal Navy. The single-seat, single-engine supersonic jet is considered to have the advanced computer and networking capabilities of any aircraft in the sky, along with stealth capabilities designed to evade enemy radars. Built by American aerospace firm Lockheed Martin, the multi-role fighter has a top speed of 1,200mph – or 1.6 times the speed of sound. India's air force does not have any F-35s and instead operates French-made Rafales as well as squadrons of mainly Russian and former Soviet aircraft. The country is looking to expand its fighter fleet. The US is considering formally offering F35s to India, but the country is concerned about the model's steep cost, heavy maintenance and operational issues. The Royal Navy's Operation Highmast is an eight-month deployment led by the HMS Prince of Wales strike group and includes exercises with allies in the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Indo-Pacific regions. The carrier group's next planned port calls are Singapore, Japan, South Korea and Australia


Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
Eating dinner at 10pm is nothing short of pyschopathic
Almost everything about Covid was bad, obviously. The virus itself, the pain it inflicted across the world, the restrictions on individual liberty, and the banging of pots with wooden spoons on our doorsteps every Thursday evening (astonishing to think this is the country that came up with Magna Carta, and yet over 800 years later we'd regressed to the point where we decided to show our appreciation by behaving like deranged toddlers with a set of kitchen equipment). On the other hand, it shifted our body clocks forward a bit, did it not? It did for me, anyway. Pre-Covid, an 8pm table booking was no problem. Splendid, in fact. Dinner out with friends, nothing could be lovelier. Post-Covid, it seemed mad. Practically wanton. Be out at that time, away from my home? Only sitting down for dinner at 8pm? What is this, Spain? Now, if I'm meeting pals for supper, I generally try to get away with a 7.30 booking, although ideally 7pm. That allows plenty of time for chit-chat but means we can still be in bed by 10. If friends are coming over for dinner, I often say to them airily 'any time from 6.30' in the hope this means I might be tucked up with my book even earlier. At any sign of lingering over the coffee and bag of Minstrels, I start loading the dishwasher. It's enormously relaxed, an evening with me. Last November, while having dinner with friends in New York – 'the city that never sleeps' – I practically fell asleep at the table because our reservation was for 9pm (although I suspect jet lag and the three margaritas before dinner didn't help matters much). But a friend across the pond says there's been a more general shift to earlier eating even there. And yet there remain among us a good number of psychopaths who want to eat at 10.30pm, or even later. I'm not referring to our southern European friends; various London restaurants have recently announced that they're opening reservation slots for later tables. Mountain, a Soho restaurant where I once tried tripe (not for me), is now offering punters the chance of a slot at 10.30pm. Tomos Parry, the co-founder and chef of Brat, a very trendy Shoreditch restaurant, says he's noticed late-night diners creeping back. If you fancy a plate of extremely spicy noodles, you can book a table at Speedboat Bar, an excellent Thai restaurant also in Soho, until 12.30am on Friday and Saturday nights. This has been hailed as a 'late-night dining revolution', which I don't remember Marx banging on about much. Restaurateurs are, naturally, delighted. Times are hard, getting punters in to eat is challenging, especially when everyone's on the fat jabs, so if they can keep throwing out plates until the wee hours for those who do want to eat, so much the better. Jeremy King, restaurant impresario, has recently unveiled a new late-night menu at his new-ish joints, The Park and Arlington. Book a table after 9.45pm and you get 25 per cent off. Notably, these are all fairly central London restaurants, and I wonder how many of their late-night clientele live reasonably close. Or at least only one zone away. Well-heeled sorts who don't baulk at the price of fillet steak and can totter home or hail a black cab for a fare under a tenner. Because if you book a table at 10.30pm, you're not going to be heading home much before midnight. The trains have stopped running back to my parts by then. There's the odd night bus if I don't mind two hours crawling southwards, or it'll be a £50 Uber. Bed by 1am, maybe, which isn't hugely practical if you have to work for a living, or have small children, or a small and unruly terrier who demands his first outing to the park at 6am. That's to say nothing of the potential digestion issues. I don't wish to be indelicate, but can one get a good night's kip if you hit the pillow with a stomach full of tripe after midnight? As Pepys himself once surmised: 'I did eat very late at night, which I perceive makes me feel heavy and sleepy.' Quite. Experts quoted in health articles constantly extol the health benefits of intermittent fasting, or restricting one's eating to an eight- or 10-hour window. But good luck with that if you're swallowing your last mouthful of crispy egg noodles after Cinderella's curfew. No more for you until at least lunchtime the following day. Many years ago, one late night as a teenager, I sat across a table from a boy I had a crush on in a restaurant called Vingt-Quatre on the Fulham Road. It had opened in 1995, London's first 24-hour restaurant, and the novelty was thrilling. The novelty of sitting near a boy, I mean, although the restaurant was pretty thrilling too. We shared a burger and the bill came with a small pot of Smarties, which seemed the height of ironic decadence. He paid and afterwards walked me back through the dark streets of Chelsea to put me on the N137 home to Stockwell, so it was a relatively chaste evening. Not the sort of thing that gets poets excited. But it felt practically Byronic to me – the late night, the Smarties, the slow meander to the Sloane Street bus stop. I swooned about it for months once safely back at boarding school. I understand it, in other words. I understand that late-night dining can be exciting, and romantic, possibly even a little dangerous if your alarm is going off soon. But my appetite for danger must have waned in the intervening 23 years because dicey behaviour these days means going to sleep after 11pm. Perhaps this is more to do with age than Covid. Or both. Still, if restaurants are increasingly catering for daredevils who wish to risk indigestion and trapped wind, those of us who prefer 7pm tables may stand more of a chance. Or maybe even 6.30pm. Could you make 6.30?


BBC News
3 hours ago
- BBC News
Hundreds mark summer solstice in lido in Plymouth
Hundreds of people have welcomed the summer solstice from a said about 400 swimmers watched the sun rise at 04:45 BST from Tinside Lido in Plymouth on summer solstice marks the beginning of the astronomical summer and is the longest day of the Lewis of Plymouth Active, the council-owned community company which runs the Grade II listed salt-water pool, said it had been "an incredible morning".