Help Videos

Hello I just want to talk to you today about our top soil. As you can see, we distribute our soil in generous 800 litre dumpy bags. These dumpy bags are put on a pallet and distributed nationwide. Each bag is distributed nationally via a truck with a tail lift or for larger loads, a truck with a mounted forklift. Today here we’ve got our 10 mil screened top soil. It’s our premium soil which has got 20% compost and 80% good quality soil. It’s so good you can even smell it. I just want to explain to you a little bit about the difference between the two best selling types of top soils that we provide.

On the left here, I’ve got our premium 10 mm screened top soil which has added compost. And here I have our super saver 20 mm screened top soil. When we look at the 10 mm screened, you’ll see it’s a nice dark color. It’s got plenty of goodness and it’s very friable. It’s got lots of goodness and nutrient in it. So it’s ideal for vegetable plots, raised beds, flower borders, any application where you really do want a good quality top soil. And as I say, the biggest particle you’ll find in this is going to be 10 millimetres.

When we move on to our super saver soil, this soil is only screened down to 20 mm particle sizes and it doesn’t have any added compost. As you can see, it’s not as dark and not as fine. But it still has a place. You’re trying to build up some ground where you still need that added bit of drainage or you’re not too fussed on the top quality of the soil. This is the one for you and of course, the best thing is it’s great value for money.

So when you’re making a choice of soil, you need to think about what you’re going to be using it for and how you want it to perform for you.

I’m just going to demonstrate on how we might repair a piece of lawn which is in bad shape. As you can see here, I’ve got a lawn which is quite downtrodden and bare, and what I want to do is to aerate it a little bit, top dress it with some organic lawn repair top dressing mix, and then seed it. What we’ve got to remember is is when we’re trying to get seed to grow, there are three crucial rules. You need soil contact, you need moisture, and you need soil temperature. If you can remember those three things, then you should be successful with growing grass seed.

So the first thing that I’m going to do as part of this process is I’m just going to aerate the surface of this soil before I put any topdressing or seed on, which is going to help it to drain and grow as part of the process. Okay, so now that I’ve loosened up the soil with a fork to aerate it, I’m going to spread our lawn repair mix so I get a nice tilth before I put the seed on. The key is is to getting it to spread nice and thin because it means less brushing in a minute. Always try to give the shovel a bit of a flick and it spread it very evenly. Okay, so the next phase, I’m going to fill my Handy Green spreader with some grass seed and I’m going to spread it over this area at about 30 grams per square metre So give it a good covering. Sometimes with seed in these spreaders, you need to agitate them a little bit so the seed comes out consistently. And for the next phase I’m going to lightly brush the repair mix in so that it’s nice and smooth and we’ve brushed some of that seed into the surface.

Okay, before we start the next phase, I’m going to check the ground, and if it needs a bit more top dressing, I can add to it. And also I like to add a little bit more seed once it’s brushed in on the surface, just to make sure there’s enough there. So last but not least, what we’re going to do now that we’ve put all this down, is we’re going to apply a nice semi organic or organic fertiliser so that it gives the new seed a good start. The key thing is is not too heavy with the fertiliser, probably about 25 grams a metre is going to be adequate. Now, the key thing, now that we’ve got this far, is to make sure that we keep the new seed bed damp at all times until we get some decent germination.

This is our Handy Green fertiliser spreader, it’s ideal for small lawns and DIY projects.

It has a guide here on the side which gives you settings, one through to five, and a handle to turn to spread the product. Every product is different so the setting will vary depending on what you’re using. All we do is simply pull in the trigger where my finger is and start fertilising

I just want to explain a little bit about our handy packs of grass seed. These are ideal for those small garden jobs where maybe you’re doing some repairs or even sowing a new lawn from seed. We usually dispatch these within two days and they’ll arrive to you by mail.

I’m going to start with this one which is our general purpose lawn seed. That is what it is, it’s a good selection of fescues and dwarf rye which are good for most lawn applications, covers about 60 square metres. Our Tuff Grass seed, this is one from Johnsons, it really is, it’s quite a new one, actually, and, again, it’s predominantly rye grass. Very hard-wearing and perfect for those patches, especially if you’ve got a dog. Really good for doing those little patches where you’ve had scorching or dieback in your lawn, and a very good over seeder if you’re over seeding your whole lawn.

Going over here to this one, this is the Johnsons Luxury lawn seed, again for finer lawns, it’s got more fescue. It’s a little bit more difficult to get to germinate, you do need quite good soil temperature, but if you’ve got a fine lawn, this is the one you need.

On the end here, I’ve got a couple of slightly more natural varieties. We’ll start with the Johnsons Country Meadow, it’s a mixture of grasses and wildflowers if you want to try to establish a small wildflower meadow. Covers about 40 square metres.

Last but not least, we’ve got our very, very popular eco lawn seed. This is a mixture of grasses and micro clover, so if you’ve got a lawn which is maybe on some poor soil maybe it’s in a bit of shade, this one could be the one for you. The nice thing about clover is is that it puts nitrogen back into the soil so it is really a very low-maintenance plant.

This is our Handy Green fertiliser spreader, it’s ideal for small lawns and DIY projects. It has a guide here on the side which gives you settings, one through to five, and a handle to turn to spread the product. Every product is different so the setting will vary depending on what you’re using. All we do is simply pull in the trigger where my finger is and start fertilising.

I just want to talk a little bit about our wildflower seed. When you go onto The Lawn Store website, you’ll see dozens and dozens of different types of seed available.

These are for different environments and also for the different types of wildflower that you might want in your garden. Much depends on soil type as to what will survive in your environment, so it’s always a good idea to be very careful about what you choose. When you buy a bag of wildflower seed it’s likely to turn up in a nice clean foil packet like this. Now it doesn’t look like much but what you’ve got to remember is is that wildflower seed is applied at a much, much lower rate than grass seed. Sometimes only two or three grams a square metre, so it’s always good to check the rates and calculate what you need.

For small areas of wildflower, or some just small areas of your garden, we also supply these little handy packs of Johnsons Meadow Grass and Wildflower seed which is a lovely little cost-effective way of creating at least a small area of wildflower in your garden.

Now you can see here, we’re displaying this on some wildflower turf. You got to remember, creating a wildflower meadow takes time. You want to plan at least a year in advance to make sure the ground is very clean and weed-free, and then when you do sew the seed, it’s going to take three or four years, probably, to get the meadow as established as this. So lots of things to take into consideration when you’re producing a wildflower meadow.

Today I want to talk about our Lawn Store wildflower felt. As you can see, I’ve got a little project here behind me of a bank which I think will be perfect for a swathe of colourful wild flowers. Wild flower felt is unique in the fact that it’s grown on a biodegradable layer of felt. So once it’s laid and it roots in, the felt will disappear and you’ll have a gorgeous wild flower meadow that you can enjoy for years to come. When I unroll it, you will see that it’s got a lovely mixture of perennial and annual wild flowers, which once rooted in, should create a gorgeous area for your garden. When you order a lawn store felt from The Lawn Store, it will arrive on a pallet with 30 square metres on board. Depending on the time of the year, the appearance of the turf will vary greatly. Sometimes the turf will arrive like this with it looking quite sparse but that’s nothing to worry about it’s because the turf is quite young or it’s been winterised In the growing periods of the year perhaps during the spring or the summer it may arrive with a lot more growth on it but their final result will be the same. Now I want to give you a few tips about how we prepare the ground in preparation for laying the wild flower felt. In fact, any wild flower area would have similar preparation to this no matter what sort of turf you’re going to use or if you’re going to seed that. And the key thing is, is you don’t need to be too particular in the preparation to create a good quality wild flower area. The key thing is, it really does need to be weed and vegetation-free because the last thing you need are unwanted weeds coming up in the turf or the seed at a later date. Now, as you can see, we’ve just completed the laying of the wild flower turf and to be perfectly honest, there’s nothing that glamorous about laying any type of wild flower turf. When it goes down it does look a bit rough but on the other hand, it’s supposed to be natural and I think you’re going to be really surprised about how this comes on over the next few months and when we get to the spring it should look great. Now I just want to show you a few little, a little tips about how we lay wild flower turf. It’s quite simple, when you lay your turf down, you butt the turfs up close together and just lay it like a piece of carpet. There’s no real secret way of doing it just cover the ground. Now, because we’ve got a slope here, I’ve got a couple of little tips for you. When we lay the turf, what I want to do is stop it from slipping down if it’s watered or when we get the next rain because it’s got to have a chance to root in and grip into the bank. So all I do is I cut down some bamboo canes with a pair of secateurs or something like that and I quite simply, at the top of the turf where it’s likely to slip, bang in a cane or two so that it can’t go anywhere. We still got a bit of tidying up to do here yet, a bit of cutting in, so we won’t waste any time and we’ll get on with it. We’re now November, we’re going to come back here in about six months-time probably around about May or June time to see what we’ve got. So, here we are now six months later on the 1st of June. And as you can see, the flowers have burst in the colour. As we go through the year and as different varieties emerge, the colours will change. And the great thing about this is, it’s an absolute haven for wildlife. There are bees and butterflies will enjoy working these wild flowers as we go through the year. When it starts to die back as we go into the winter, it becomes attractive in a different way as the seed heads appear and the frost make it look gorgeous in a totally different way.

This is an impact sprinkler. We tend to favour impact sprinklers because they fire the water a long way and they’re quite efficient. We supply this sprinkler so it will attach to a normal garden hose, with a click clack fitting, and there’s lots of adjustments on here, which you can do to suit your garden. So the first thing I want to show you is, is you can adjust how far the sprinkler head rotates by adjusting these two tabs here. So if you put this sprinkler say on an edge of a patio and you didn’t want to get the patio wet, you could just have it going backwards and forwards at 180 degrees so it just waters the lawn and not the patio. However, if you wanted it to rotate further, you can adjust accordingly and you can get almost a 360 degree pattern. What the sprinkler does, is when it’s going one way, it shoots the water out a long way and then on its return, it does the inner part of the curve so that everything has got wet. So these two tabs are very important when you’re trying to adjust your sprinkler to suit your lawn. There is a little clip here, which if you pull it out the way the sprinkler would just keep going round and round and round, which is actually quite useful if you’re in a low pressure water situation, which won’t activate the mechanism properly, but usually you would keep this clip down so it can go backwards and forwards. Now what we have here is a flap on the top, which can be pushed up or down to distort the water if required. We had on demonstration here a moment ago and we had the flap right out the way, which is what most people would do so the water goes the furthest. However, if you didn’t want to get your neighbours wet for argument sake or who was going too high, you can just adjust this flap, which distorts the water that comes out at this shoot here. The other way of distorting the water is by this little grub screw that you can wind in and out, which has a very similar effect to distort the water flow. So really a really good efficient sprinkler, you can also get the up and over type sprinklers, but we actually prefer these. So we have here an alternative type of impact sprinkler, as you can see it looks a bit different to the regular one, but these become really popular because they tend to work better with lower water pressure. They fire the water a long way, which we really like and they just seem to be really efficient. They work in a very similar way to the standard impact sprinkler, they have your adjusters in just the same way and a distortion screw. They don’t have this little flap on the top, but I don’t think that really matters, it doesn’t get used very often, anyhow. So for gardens, with sort of normal water pressure or even high water pressure, we’d really recommend these. We tend to sell a lot of them. They’ve become a really popular in recent years.