To renew your lawn without digging

Your lawn is just a patchy patch of moss and weeds? 

No problem: With these tips you can easily renew your lawn on a weekend - without digging around!

to renew an unkempt lawn, many hobby gardeners imagine it to be a tedious and extremely sweaty job. 

The good news is that the spade can stay in the tool shed, 

because renewing a lawn and laying out a lawn can be done without digging around.

To prepare for renovation, you should first mow your old lawn to normal stem length, i.e. 

about three and a half to four centimeters high, and then apply a lawn fertilizer. 

Provided it is warm and humid enough, 

the green carpet will be in full bloom just two weeks later and you can begin to renew your green carpet.

How can you renew a lawn without digging?

1. Mow the lawn as short as possible
2. Scarify the lawn thoroughly
3. Spreading seed mixture for lawn renovation
4. Watering the lawn with sprinklers

 Deep mowing and scarifying of old lawn

First mow the grass as short as possible: 

To do this, set your lawn mower to the lowest setting. 

If you only have a small electric mower, you should rent a powerful petrol 

mower - the performance requirements are much higher than for normal lawn mowing.

To replace it, the short mowed lawn must be scarified: 

In contrast to conventional scarifying, set the machine so low that the rotating 

blades cut into the ground a few millimetres deep. 

After you have scarified the old lawn once in longitudinal tracks, drive it down 

again at right angles to the original direction of travel - this is the best way to remove weeds and moss from the lawn. 

If there are still large weed nests in the lawn after the first scarifying, 

it is recommended that you repeat this step once or twice. 

Then, everything that the scarifier has scraped out of the lawn is thoroughly removed from the lawn.

The scarifier (left) removes moss, lawn felt and also decimates weeds when the blades can penetrate a few millimeters into the soil (right)

Slight unevenness in the lawn can be evened out after scarifying by applying a thin layer of sandy topsoil, 

which is spread with a lawn squeegee. The layer should not be higher than ten centimeters.

Sowing with the spreader

Now apply a special seed mixture for lawn renovation. 

If you are inexperienced in sowing by hand, it is best to use a spreader, 

as it is important, especially when renovating a lawn, 

that the seed is distributed evenly and without gaps over the entire area. 

After sowing, a special starter lawn fertilizer is then spread over the area. 

It has a high phosphorus content and the nitrogen is partly bound in a fast-acting urea compound.

MSG/Folkert Siemens

It is best to spread seed and fertilizer with a spreader

To prevent the seeds from drying out, cover them with a thin layer of humus. 

You can use conventional plant or potting soil for this. 

It is spread over the surface with a shovel and best spread evenly with a broom 

so that the top layer is about five millimeters thick everywhere.

Finally, water the lawn thoroughly

In the last step, the renovated lawn is thoroughly watered with a sprinkler, 

so that the lawn seeds get a good ground contact and germinate quickly. 

If you have a lawn roller, you can slightly compact the surface beforehand, 

but this is not absolutely necessary when renewing a lawn using the method presented here. 

Important: Make sure that the lawn never dries out in the coming weeks. 

As soon as the planting soil turns light brown on the surface, you will have to water it again. 

If the weather is favorable, your lawn will look like new after only two months.