Common lawn diseases

Lawn diseases are more common than you think. They mainly are caused by fungus that attack the grass and remove all the vital nutrients your lawn needs to survive on. Red thread is the most common lawn disease. Other diseases are: snow mould, fairy rings, rust, leaf spot and fusarium.

Red thread:

Red thread is the most common lawn disease in the UK. You can recognise red thread by looking at your lawn; do you see a pink/red tint in your lawn? This is red thread. When taking a closer look at your lawn, you will see some very thin needles coming through the grass blades.

Red thread is mainly caused by high humidity. However, it can also be caused by the following: Thatch, drought, bad mowing systems, a lack of feeding your lawn and soil compaction.

With our regular lawn treatments and adopting some mowing techniques, you will see a decrease in red thread.

Fairy rings:

Are you seeing some rings, circles of mushrooms or dark areas in your lawn? Then you most likely have fairy rings. This is caused by fungus in mainly turf grass, usually, fairy rings will grow when there is a layer of thatch, but they generally will not kill the grass. It will however, dry out the lawn and this is where you will see dry patches in the lawn like this picture.

We can help you fertilise your lawn, this helps reduce the appearance of fairy rings and we can aerate the lawn to allow water to fully reach the roots within fairy rings.

Snow mould:

Snow mould will live in lawns that have poor air circulation. During cold weather, snow mould will spread quite quickly (the best conditions for this is when there is snow on the surface, meaning very poor air circulation) and will become noticeable when the snow melts.

Obviously, we understand you cannot keep snow from landing onto your lawn, so you should always be prepared for this to happen. This is where we can help. We can apply a fungicide and/or a hollow tine aeration to get the air to circulate. You can learn more about hollow tine aeration here.

Rust:

Rust is one the most common turf diseases. What does rust do? Well, rust will attack the leaf plant and cause an abundance of damage. Luckily, rust does not attack the whole plant, so we have a good chance of recovering this.

Rust is most seen in Autumn and Spring, (the weather is mild and damp) and lives off of plants that suffer from stress. But, don’t worry! We can help, give us a call or fill out the contact form below.

Leaf spot:

Leaf spot is very common across the UK. It thrives in the warmer weather and is caused by many different fungi. Plants affected by this will be ones that suffer the most stress, as normally, healthy plants aren’t affected.

To help control this, we recommend that your lawn is cut regularly and the blades are kept sharp, mowing the lawn on a high setting.

Fusarium:

Fusarium and snow mould are almost the same as one another. You see this disease mainly during Autumn and Winter. Fusarium thrives off of misty and rainy conditions. You may start seeing small, circular yellow patches which after no treatment, will turn brown and may even kill your grass.

If you start seeing any signs of lawn diseases, then please fill out the contact form below, we are happy to help.