I'm Alan Brown, and I've been keeping lawns for years, my own and plenty of other people's.
Friends and neighbours started asking me to help plan theirs, and it turned into a habit. Someone would be putting in new turf and want to know which grass to pick. Someone else had a strip down the side of the house where nothing would grow, no matter what they threw at it. After enough of those conversations I started writing the answers down, and this site is where they ended up.
A good lawn is a design problem first
This is the thing I wish someone had told me early on. Most lawn trouble starts before a single blade goes in.
A lawn fighting the shade, the foot traffic or the sheer size of the yard will never look right, no matter how much you feed it. The grass that thrives in a wide open backyard in full sun is not the grass for a narrow side courtyard that gets four hours of light and the dog running through it twice a day. Work out what the space can actually support, then look after it properly, and most of the hard work disappears.
What actually makes a lawn look good
Rarely what people expect, and rarely a product. It comes down to five things:
- Choosing a grass that suits the light, the traffic and the climate where you actually live.
- Mowing at the right height for that grass, and often enough that you never take too much off at once.
- Watering deeply and less often, so the roots grow down chasing it instead of sitting near the surface.
- Feeding at the right time of year, rather than whenever the bag happens to come out of the shed.
- Fixing the soil underneath before blaming the grass on top of it.
Get those five right and the lawn looks after itself for most of the year. Nearly everything else on this site is detail hanging off them.
What you'll find here
Practical guides written for Australian backyards. Which grass suits which space, how to lay it, how to keep it alive through summer, and what to do when something goes wrong and you can't work out why.
Where the advice changes depending on the grass you've got, I say which grass. Where it changes depending on where in the country you live, I say that too. A lawn in Darwin and a lawn in Hobart are not the same job, and advice that pretends otherwise is how people end up doing the right thing at the wrong time of year.
Get in touch
Spotted something wrong, or got a question I haven't answered? Use the contact page. If a guide here has an error in it I want to know, and I'll correct it.