Autumn: Season of Mists, Mellow Fruitfulness, and Moss...

Ever wondered why the word for “to scrape out all the moss and dead grass from your lawn” is Scarify? 

Answer - because it's pretty darned scary-fying to do it! 

You start with what appears to be a nice, normal, green lawn: you apply the autumn “weed and feed” product, either by trundling a little cart up and down the lawn, or by doing the old-fashioned broadcasting by hand, with sweeping arm motions: then a fortnight later you are confronted with big black patches where the moss has been killed, and you look at it in horror and realise that you can't just leave it, you have to get out there and scrape out the dead stuff.

If you are lucky, you'll have a little electric scarifier, which looks like a cut-down mower but with long thin teeth instead of a blade: if you are less lucky you'll have an ecologically-sound hand-push scarifier, which looks like a minimalist rake on wheels: or if you are really, really, unlucky you'll just have the good old Spring Rake, which we use in Autumn (gardeners' joke).

Whatever tool you have, when you start to apply it to the lawn, masses and masses of moss will spring up in an apparently endless supply, leaving you with scary bare-looking patches, and a massive bagful of fluffy green stuff that cannot be put on the compost, as it is mostly moss, and therefore you would end up with compost full of moss spores. And you certainly don't want to spread the moss around the garden any further! 

Here are a couple of photos, showing the process:

First we have an area of the lawn which the moss-killer has revealed.

The moss is dying off, and there are bare patches showing.

Out with the folding Spring Rake (“which we use in Autumn”... gardeners don't have many in-jokes, so we have to make the most of the ones we do have) which I find does the job better than a “fixed” one, as you can alter the width of the tines to get the best effect. 

To use it, just scrape it across the grass - and although I use the word “scrape” it's actually quite a light combing action - the trick is to get the moss out but to leave the grass behind, so there's quite a lot of upward motion. 

 

Here's an "action picture" - I generally comb it once in one direction, then at a right angle, then again like this, in a swirling motion, in order to a) get the last of the moss out, and b) remove the rather odd partings that you get, if you just rake in straight lines. 

Great for the stomach muscles, allegedly: I ought, by rights, to have the female equivalent of an impressive six-pack by now but alas, I'm still soft and squishy (*sighs*) in the stomach department. 

But at least the lawn is looking better!  

Here you can see a handful of dead moss, with a few strands of live grass in it - it's impossible to avoid snapping off a few strands, it's more important to get out as much moss as you can.

If your handful is more grass than moss, though, "do it a little more gently!"

This debris should not go onto the compost: moss itself takes a long, long time to rot down, plus it leaves the compost heap full of spores, as mentioned above, so if you try to compost it, you will just end up with moss all over the flower beds as well as in the lawn... instead, burn it, bag it and take it to the tip, or put it in the green waste wheelie bin: at the commercial green waste facilities, they achieve much, much higher temperatures than our little domestic composters, so they are able to safely compost the moss, and kill off all the moss spores. 

I have had people ask if this raked-up moss can be used in floral arrangements, instead of buying expensive sphagnum moss, and the answer is Yes - if you didn't apply moss killer beforehand. (Because if you did, it will be black, instead of green!) I do have one friend who cultivates a Japanese Moss Garden, which is like a lawn which has been really, really badly infested with moss, to the point where there is no actual grass left. She loves it: it's green, it's springy, it does not require mowing: and every so often, she'll rake off a section of it, and use the resulting rakings for making decorative wreaths.

Once this is all done, you should be left with a somewhat bare-looking grassy patch: the blackened dead moss is gone, but now the soil is showing through.

So the next job is to scatter a little fresh lawn seed on the bare patches, and they will soon green up again. 

And in case you are wondering "can't I just scatter the grass seed over the mossy bits, and not bother with all this raking and hard work?" then the answer is no - the moss prevents the grass seed from making contact with the soil, so it doesn't germinate. You need to scarify first, in order to make a clear passage down through the existing grass, to the soil beneath.

There, all done!

Well, not quite: it's an unfortunate fact that if you have moss in your lawn, just raking out the existing moss won't cure the problem, and that's another whole subject: but at least by removing it annually you can prevent it taking over the grass completely, and it gives the grass a chance to recover. 

September is a great time to do this, so get your weed'n'feed applied, wait a fortnight, then get raking!

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