We have a large lawn in the wardenry gardens. One area has been a lawn for a very long time and has previously been of sufficient quality and flatness to host croquette and tennis matches. The second area was formal flowerbeds until a few years ago. The dipped edges of the old beds are still visible, but grass has taken over and made mowing… complicate!
I first saw the lawn in late autumn 2020. There was a couple of piles of garden waste and the grass was long. A previous cut had not been cleared away and so patches of dead grass were also dotted around. To add a final note of woe to this scene, it was also raining heavily which meant that there was little chance we’d be able to mown the lawn until spring.
I also found 3 old lawn mowers in the shed last Autumn and I decided it would be brilliant if one of the mowers could take on the job of mowing the lawn by the spring! I worked on them over the winter, cleaning carburettors and removing rust.
Spring arrived and I started to prepare the formal lawn section for it’s first mow, while attempting to ignore the scruffier area! I raked it to get as much of the old thatch and dead grass out as i could and I rolled it with an old stone roller I found by the stables, which in no way suggests that the lawn ended up flat.
It was getting more urgent to have a mower ready and working. I’d had the Atco engine running but the clutch was stuck and the Flymo had ‘flown’ in a short run outside the stables, but hadn’t wanted to started again since. Over the next week I managed to get the Atco clutch sorted out and it had a maiden voyage up the garden and back, but it was obvious that this machine is built for precision, not bush cutting, and I reverted back to the Flymo. I bought £5 worth of new bolts which thankfully fixed the last remaining problem and all of a sudden…
… on Tuesday 6th April I triumphantly cut the whole lawn. Including the dodgy rough section! There’s still a lot of work required to get the lawn back to it’s former glory, but these things come one step at a time. The next fix needs to be the still very lumpy part of the lawn where the formal flower beds used to be. You can look forward to that in a future update. For now, here’s some pics of the lawn so far.
