With the exception of broadcast spreaders, most spreaders will offer you some way of controlling how fast you spread. A broadcast spreader has a spinning wheel attached beneath a single hole from which the compost drops. Let’s take a closer look at these and I’ll share my specific recommendations and what I like to use for each type of tool. The spreading width can be set to anything between 122 and 340cm, depending on how precise or how efficient you’d like your spreading to be.

Most professional lawn care companies will be able to offer a choice of tine should you prefer spiking. Keeping on top of your weeds is a great way to preserve the health of your lawn during the colder months. Nowadays, most people avoid the kind of major yard project that I engaged in at first, and they use either a heavy-duty spreader for a large yard, or a smaller model when the yard isn’t quite so big. On the other hand, if you need to treat some kind of athletic field, or perhaps the grounds around your local church or school, you may want to go with a heavy-duty spreader such as TurfTime’s 3065 Topdresser, which has a hopper capable of containing 7.Start at one end of the lawn and shovel equal portions from your wheelbarrow at regular intervals across the lawn. No matter what the conditions, once the regrowth has reached about 60mm in height it is time to start mowing again. Closely related to Fusarium is Snow Mould, another cold weather disease that thrives in lawns with poor air circulation. Some homeowners have compost tumblers or bins and make their own compost in their backyard from leaves, grass clippings, and other organic matter. It works with essentially any material with small enough granules, including salt, and you have a lot of control over how fast it spreads with the included settings.

You don’t want to add topdressing sand without first aerating the greens through scarification or verticutting. When growth and weather conditions allow, your lawn should be scarified to remove thatch and the matted and horizontal growth that has accumulated over time. As you know, your golf course uses small quantities of topdressing sand that you apply to your golf course greens throughout the growing season. An air-filled tire is a bit easier to roll, but that tire will always be flat when you pull your wheelbarrow out of the garage and need to use it. Just doing it once was enough to convince me that manual spreading was a bit too labor-intensive, and that I would be much better off with some mechanical assistance.DIY Scarifying can be done by using your own scarifier, by hiring one from a local hire centre or by employing a local professional lawn care company. Most top dressings are made up of a mix of sand and loam with the proportions stated, such as a 50/50 or 70/30 sand/loam mix.

The layer spread is generally about ¼ of an inch in depth, and is used to amend and improve your lawn’s soil and improve moisture retention without interfering with the growth of existing grass. On a hand spreader, there’s normally a switch you can turn to control how much is released with each rotation of the handle. Spiking tends to be much cleaner than hollow-tining because it does not produce cores, however most lawn care professionals believe that hollow-tining is more effective because it allows more air into the surface of the soil and root-prunes as the core is removed. The hopper capacity is also quite good, and when full, this spreader is still easy enough to manoeuvre. Thatch can form a thick layer of dead and dying grass material that, restricts water and air movement into and out of the soil.Once seeded, very lightly brush the seed into the loose top dressing, firm or roll the surface and fertilise with a seasonal fertiliser and if doing this in spring use a feed for all lawns or one for sandy soil even if you have clay soil. Raking up the leaves in your garden may be seen as one of the most basic things you can do, but it does have a lot of effects. When top dressing, the first and most crucial step is choosing what type of material you should use. Removing this bulky, dense material increases the percentage of air in the soil and greatly relieves surface compaction. The next step will be to carry out aeration using either hollow-tines or solid tines, and then to over-seed any thin or bare areas so the lawn can recover and look better than ever.