A Summary on Lawn Scalping & Ways to Prevent It

If you own a lawn in your private space, the term lawn scalping may not be new to you. The brown colour of your lawn will give panic attacks when you are taking all steps to maintain it. Curb Wise has the best team of landscaping experts to help with various gardening strategies. You can find more here on unique mowing practices for healthy lawns.
An Overview of Lawn Scalping
Lawn scalping mostly happens when you don’t perform regular mowing. Many hindrances come in our way when we try hard to stick to a routine to take good care of the lawn. A week of heavy rain is enough to make mowing impossible. Otherwise, if the mowing procedure is performed by cutting at the crown or growing point of the grass, it causes an instant browning of the lawn, that looks uneven. In such circumstances, you must give time for the grass to recover. But the sad news is that there is a high risk of the grass not recovering from scalping. You can prevent lawn scalping by mowing at an appropriate height.
Importance of Frequent Mowing
Frequent mowing is essential to maintain a healthy lawn. If you have grass that grows very quickly like the Bermuda variety, it goes without saying to keep practicing mowing regularly. You can follow a lawn maintenance guide or hire a professional lawn maintenance service to ensure nothing goes wrong.
Robotic lawn mowers are another option to scalp a lawn effectively. They can mow the lawn either with or without your guidance. As they are machines specially designed to maintain the lawn in proper form, they mow at the right height and work more like a robot vacuum cleaner. Robotic lawn mowers work daily by trimming a small portion of the grass to prevent lawn scalping.
Continuous mowing prevents scalping and reduces thatch. Only tiny bits are cut off when the grass is clipped off daily. Small pieces of grass decompose easily and do not build to form thatch. However, if there are bigger clippings, they are higher chances of developing thatch.
Scalping Removes Thatch- How?
Though there are a lot of ways to remove thatch, scalping is an effective method to remove it. The right time is spring, so March or April is the perfect season to perform scalping to remove thatch. But scalping for thatch removal is not as easy as it sounds. Owing to the risks associated, many prefer the following three methods to remove thatch.
- Top the lawn with a quarter-inch of organic soil to enable thatch decomposition.
- Use a core aerator right after the spring green-up. It offers sufficient aeration and water flow, thereby increasing the pace of thatch decomposition.
- Try using a de-thatching machine.
- Before the spring green-up, rake the lawn heavily to collect and remove debris. This method is cost-effective but requires more manual work. Therefore, if you have a small lawn, you can try following this method.
The Takeaway
With the tips mentioned above, try regularizing mowing practice and prevent lawn scalping. To make things work easier, invest in a robotic mower that will do the job easily for you on a daily basis in no time.