Creating Perfect Lawns

When it comes to beautiful and immaculate lawns, Queensland and Northern NSW have a climate that is hard to beat for good growth just about all year round. With our mild winter and warm, humid spring and summer, lawns are a must for our beautiful gardening climate.
	To create a perfect lawn: • Fertilise with Robust® Lawn Booster each season. • Spray weeds with the Searles range of weed killers. • Give your lawn a thorough soaking once a week for deeper roots.
FERTILISING For a wonderful green and soft lawn, it will need fertilising. Contrary to what many may think, lawns don’t need a lot of fertilising at any one time; they just need a small amount of fertiliser on a regular basis. However, with most lawn foods this would mean that you would be fertilising every couple of weeks and this can be inconvenient and labour intensive. Common instant release lawn foods give very fast growth, which usually means that you’ll have to be mowing it by the next weekend. The problem with these types of ‘instant’ lawn foods is that after the first mowing, most of the nutrients have gone and the growth diminishes. Quite often, because they cause such fast and tall growth, the lawn will look scalped and scathed after mowing and this is the perfect condition for new weed growth. SEARLES® ROBUST® LAWN BOOSTER What lawns like is steady, regular feeding. To achieve this, Searles have developed a new lawn fertiliser that will feed steadily for up to four months. Searles Robust® Lawn Booster is a new controlled release fertiliser that will give instant results and produce steady, strong growth for 3-4 months after application. This means beautiful soft growth, infrequent mowing and less weeds. This is what the professionals use on sports grounds, golf tees, fairways and parks. To achieve a beautiful lawn this year, apply Robust® Lawn Booster in spring, then again in summer, followed up by an application in autumn before next winter. It is as easy as that. You will not need to reapply every 3-4 weeks to keep your lawn green. The benefits of fertilising with Robust® Lawn Booster are that it slowly releases the nutrients over a 3-4 month period, giving good, strong and steady growth. Producing more steady growth means that the grass grows in a robust fashion, developing a dense and compact lawn that does not need mowing as often. If you couple this with a mower height that does not scalp into the undergrowth of the turf, the dense lawn helps to form a natural barrier to weeds, smothering them and not allowing them to get a foothold. Another major benefit is that Robust® Lawn Booster is an environmentally friendly fertiliser. Because it steadily releases the nutrients as the lawn needs them and does not dump them all at once, the amount of nutrients leaching into waterways is reduced and more fertiliser stays on the lawn, providing improved growth. The third major benefit of Robust® Lawn Booster is that a little goes a long way, providing tremendous value for money. Robust® Lawn Booster comes in three bag sizes: 2.5kg, 4kg and 8kg. An 8kg bag will cover 530 square metres of established lawn and a massive 1030 square metres of newly laid turf or lawn sown from seed, in its young stages. WEEDS Spring is the time to prepare your lawn if you want results right through summer. There are some jobs that need to be done as early as possible and the first one is to clean up nuisance weeds such as bindii, clover, dandelion, thistles and many other weeds that thrive through the winter and into spring and summer. Once these weeds invade our home turf and set seed, they keep coming back year after year. The trick to eliminating them is to spray early, preferably before the weeds set seed and to continue with repeated applications. Repeated applications are necessary in order to kill weeds that have germinated after the previous spraying. Bindii Bindii is a major nuisance weed in our warmer climate. To control bindii, it needs to be sprayed from late winter through to spring, before the prickles become apparent. It is actually the prickles of the bindii, the ones that cause the distressing ‘ouch’ when walked on, that are the seeds for next year’s bindii.

SEARLES LAWN PERFECT®
Searles have just launched a new range of high quality premium lawn sprays designed specifically for lawn maintenance in our climate. To effectively clear up bindii, clover, dandelion and many other common broadleaf weeds, spray with Searles Lawn Perfect®. Searles Lawn Perfect® is a very powerful weedkiller containing three professional herbicides that gives a massive coverage and fast weed kill. One 200ml bottle will cover 400 square metres of established lawn, or the 500ml bottle will cover a massive 1000 square metres of lawn. This means that one bottle will last for many spray applications, giving excellent value for money and most of all, a perfect lawn.

DIFFERENT SPRAYS FOR DIFFERENT WEEDS
Because there are so many different weeds, you will sometimes need more than one type of spray. Because of this, Searles have developed a range of sprays to cover all lawn types and a multitude of weeds. The five sprays include:

• Searles Lawn Perfect®
• Searles Lawnweeder
• Searles Paspalum, Nutgrass and Clover Killer
• Searles Bindii & Clover Killer
• Searles Buffalo Master®

All five sprays are of the usual Searles high quality, giving professional results. It is always best to check with your local garden centre or store for advice on your lawn type and weeds that are growing, to make sure you get the very best results. Further information on all sprays to be used on which lawns CLICK HERE.

WETTING AGENT
To achieve the best results when spraying weeds, it is advisable to add a wetting agent. Searles Spredmax® is a wetting agent designed to improve spray results and success. When mixing the weedkiller, also add to the diluted solution Searles Spredmax®. By doing this, the spray will stick to the leaves of weeds far more effectively. This is particularly important for many weeds that have waxy or hard leaves. Quite often, sprays will not stick to these leaves and will run off, giving only partial results. Weedkillers mainly work by covering the weed leaf and the longer they stick to it, the better the results.

So for the best results from every spraying, add Searles Spredmax®.

WATERING Regular watering is very important in maintaining a healthy lawn. How we apply the water also plays a major role in the overall health of the lawn. When watering, it is best to apply a decent quantity of water at a time. Give it a good, thorough soaking about once a week rather than a light watering. Deep watering encourages grass roots to grow deeper into the soil, whereas light watering promotes shallow root growth. Deeper roots can utilise water and minerals from deeper in the soil and the lawn will survive the heat of summer far better. The soil acts as a natural insulation to the roots, so if the roots are shallow, they will heat up quickly in hot weather, causing stress to the lawn. Whenever fertilising the lawn, always water in deeply after fertilising. If possible, also wet the soil the day before as this will help the fertiliser soak deep into the soil to where the roots penetrate.
	LAWN DRY OUT Lawn dry out is a very common and often annoying problem in our hot climate. It is especially prevalent in sandy soils, but can happen in any soil. Dry out is where the water will not soak right into the soil. Quite often, when water is applied it will sit on the soil surface, pooling or draining away without soaking into the soil. If you dig into the soil after watering and the soil surface and around the roots is still dry, then you have soil ‘dry out’. There is a very easy solution to overcoming soil dry out - Penetraide® Re-wetting Granules. Penetraide® Re-wetting Granules are marvellous granules that prevent soil dry out. To apply Penetraide, sprinkle them onto the soil just like you would a fertiliser and then simply water them in. They can even be applied together with a fertiliser like Robust® Lawn Booster. Once the water comes into contact with the Penetraide® granules, they slowly release a special wetting agent that soaks into the soil. Now, even if the soil does dry out in very hot weather, when you water again, the water will penetrate and soak straight into the soil and to the grass roots, giving excellent growth. Once you have applied Penetraide®, there will be no more dry out. Reapply every six months and you will have a lawn that will be the envy of all your neighbours.
So, for a perfect lawn this year, Searles have the gear and the know-how. By using products that make the job easier and give results in less work time, you can have more time to enjoy the marvellous fun and benefits of a lush green lawn for the whole family. Happy Gardening with Searles from the Searle family. © Copyright 2002 JC & AT Searle Pty Ltd You may make a copy of this Fact Sheet for your personal, non-commercial use only. Please do not make any other use of this Fact Sheet without first obtaining our permission.