Spring has sprung at Stoke Park

With longer daylight hours and milder weather, it finally feels as though spring has sprung. With the new season, the gardens are bursting with colour once again and the first cuts of grass are imminent, tidying them up after a long winter.

To celebrate National Garden Week, our Estate Director has given us some top tips in maintaining your lawn throughout the year and how to deal with the dreaded moss that may have appeared to create the perfect garden lawn.

• With the lawns just starting to grow, a top off with the mower will do no harm, letting it grow nicely.
• It has been a good winter for moss so now is the ideal time to deal with it. A light feed will help the grass to get going and help out-compete the moss. Just repeat the feed every 6 weeks right through to the end of September, applying at 1/2 the recommended rate, keeping the grass nice and healthy through the summer months.
• At the beginning of October give the lawn a scarifier and do a double pass in different directions, followed by a cut at your summer height. Then an over seed top dress with sand and roll and follow this with an autumn feed at full rate. The reason for doing all the scarification at the end of the season is that the grass will be healthier then and will recover better. Even if it gets cold everything will sit happy until the spring.
• The following spring, give the lawn a spike early March followed by a cut, then another over-seed and begin the fertiliser program again. Repeat scarification in October and by this time the moss in the lawn should be down to about 15 % which is about right for a nice garden lawn.
• Below is the NPK value in each type of fertiliser, which will be on the pack and does not have to be exactly this just as close as you can get it. Good luck with your lawns!

Spring feed 5.10.10 + iron

Summer feed 15.5.5

Autumn feed 5.10.10 + iron

National Garden Week is the perfect excuse to take in and visit some of the country’s most stunning gardens whilst in full bloom. Next time you visit Stoke Park, be sure to visit the Memorial Gardens as part of the Heritage Walk. The Memorial Gardens cover around 20 acres and include over 2,000 private gardens including rock and water gardens, rose gardens, formal gardens enclosed by yew hedges, informal gardens surrounded by beautiful flowering shrubs, parterre gardens, health gardens and individual specimen trees and shrubs. The garden is a place of remembrance, founded by the late Sir Noel Mobbs who acquired the land in 1930 with the object of preserving the beauty and tranquillity of Stoke Poges.