Lawn Renovation Perth

Does your lawn need renovating or replacing?

Worth working out before you spend anything. A few signs that renovation is the better call:

• The lawn feels spongy or bouncy underfoot, like walking on a mattress
• Water pools on top for a moment before soaking in, or runs straight off
• Dry patches keep coming back in the same spots, season after season
• The mower scalps the high points and leaves brown patches behind
• There’s a thick, matted layer of brown material between the green blades and the soil
• Growth has slowed right down even in spring, and the colour is washed out

If you’ve still got reasonable grass coverage, say 60 per cent or better, renovation will almost always get you a better result for less money than new turf.

If the lawn is more weed than grass, or the coverage is genuinely gone, that’s a turf job.

We’ll tell you straight which one you’re looking at.

Why Perth lawns run down in the first place

Three things gang up on lawns here, and they feed each other.

Our soil is sand, and sand gives up easily

Most of Perth sits on Bassendean or Spearwood sands. Beautiful to dig, hopeless at holding anything. Water drains through in seconds, nutrients wash out with it, and organic matter breaks down fast in the heat.

Worse, once these sands dry out properly they can turn water repellent. A waxy coating builds up on the sand grains and the water simply refuses to soak in. You’ll see it on the verge in February: sprinkler running, water beading and rolling sideways, soil bone dry three centimetres down.

Thatch builds up faster than you’d think

Thatch is the layer of old runners, stems and dead material that collects between the green growth and the soil. A thin layer is fine. Past about 15mm it starts causing trouble.

Buffalo and kikuyu are the worst offenders because they both spread by above-ground runners that pile up on themselves. Once that layer gets thick, the grass starts rooting into the thatch instead of the soil, which means the roots are sitting in a dry sponge rather than in the ground. Water and fertiliser never reach where they need to go. Fungus and lawn pests move in because it’s warm and sheltered in there.

Compaction closes the door

Kids, dogs, cricket in the backyard, a trampoline that’s been in the same spot for four years. Foot traffic squeezes the soil particles together and pushes the air out. Roots need air. No air, no root growth, and the lawn gets shallower and thirstier every year.

The best time to renovate a lawn in Perth

Spring. September through to about November is the sweet spot.

Warm-season grasses, which is nearly everything grown in Perth, need warm soil and active growth to recover from renovation.

Do it in spring and the lawn has the whole growing season ahead of it to fill back in.

Early autumn works too for lighter jobs, roughly March into April, while the soil still has heat in it.

What we won’t do is a hard renovation in the middle of winter.

The grass is barely growing, it can’t repair the damage, and you’ll be looking at a scalped lawn until October.

Mid-summer is a bad idea for the opposite reason: the lawn is already stressed, and the sprinkler roster won’t let you water it enough to get it through.

One thing worth knowing: Perth’s sprinkler roster runs two days a week on your allocated days, and there’s a total switch-off between 1 June and 31 August.

Renovated lawns can sometimes qualify for a watering exemption through Water Corporation.

Ask us and we’ll point you in the right direction before we start.

Renovation by lawn type

The grass you’ve got changes what we can do.

Buffalo (Sir Walter, Palmetto, Matilda)

Buffalo spreads only by above-ground runners. Cut those off at ground level and there’s nothing underground to regrow from, so buffalo gets a lighter touch. We vertimow at a set height rather than down into the soil, and we’re careful with scalping. Buffalo is also the variety most likely to need renovating, because it builds thatch quickly.

Kikuyu

The tough one. Kikuyu has underground rhizomes as well as surface runners, so it takes a hard renovation and bounces back fast. Kikuyu also builds thatch quickly, and it’s the variety most likely to be growing in a bouncy 40mm mattress by the time we see it.

Couch (Wintergreen, TifTuf)

Handles aggressive renovation well and recovers quickly in warm weather. Couch responds beautifully to coring and top dressing, and it’s the variety where you’ll see the biggest visual improvement from levelling out an uneven surface.

Zoysia (Empire, Sir Grange)

Slow-growing by nature, which means slow to recover. We renovate zoysia gently and early in spring so it has the maximum window to fill in.

What it looks like afterwards

Honest answer: worse, for a few weeks.

A freshly renovated lawn looks like it’s been through a war.

Brown, short, scarred, with plugs of soil scattered across it if we’ve cored.

Every client who hasn’t seen it before gets a bit of a shock on day one.

Give it two to three weeks in spring and you’ll see the colour coming back.

Four to six weeks and it’s usually looking better than it did before we started.

By the end of the growing season it’s a different lawn: thicker, greener, softer underfoot, and it holds its colour into summer instead of falling over in January.

The other change most people notice is the water bill.

A lawn with open soil and a proper root system needs a lot less water than one sitting on top of a thatch layer.

Perth suburbs we cover

We run teams through Perth’s western and northern suburbs every day, including Trigg, Sorrento, Dianella, Churchlands, Kingsley and the surrounding areas.

If you’re nearby and not listed, give us a call anyway.

Book a lawn renovation

Send us a message or give Shane a call and we’ll come and have a look at what you’ve got.

We’ll tell you whether renovation will get you where you want to go, or whether you’d be better off with new turf, and we’ll quote either way with no obligation.

Call 0408 479 961

Honest, reliable and friendly service.