Advice

Each job, step by step in the order it is done

Each page walks one job from the first move to the final check, and marks the step that everything after it depends on. A product is named only where the job genuinely needs one — and more than one of these ends by telling you to buy nothing, because cutting higher changes more than any machine could. Where the answer depends on your own soil, your own slope or a limit the maker sets, the page hands over to the documentation instead of paraphrasing it.

Getting started

What to look at before buying anything, on a lawn you have just inherited and cannot yet diagnose.

A lawn you inherited, and the order to do things in Most advice on lawns assumes you already know what is wrong with yours. This page assumes you have just acquired one and do not. It is a sequence of looking before a sequence of buying, and the first three steps cost nothing.

Choosing a mower

Power source, deck, drive — in the order they matter, and with the square-metre figure left out of the decision.

Choosing a mower, on the garden rather than the lawn size Mower listings are organised around a figure with no publisher: the area in square metres a machine is said to suit. This page runs the decision on the four things that were actually measured, in the order they end up mattering.

Setting up a robot

Where the dock goes, how the boundary is laid, and the corrections every installation needs in its first week.

Installing a robot, and the afternoon that decides the season A robot is not a purchase, it is an installation. The machine that works and the machine that sulks in a corner are frequently the same model, set up by two people who made different decisions in one afternoon.

Mowing the season

Height and frequency from the first cut to the last, generated from one rule and adjusted by growth.

Mowing through the season, by growth and not by the calendar Everything on this page comes out of a single rule — never take more than a third of the height at once — applied to a lawn that grows at wildly different rates between March and October. The calendar is a poor guide and growth is a good one.

Watering

Deep and infrequent, and the two twenty-minute measurements that replace a season of guessing.

Watering a lawn, measured once rather than guessed weekly Two measurements, each taking twenty minutes and made once, replace an entire season of guessing: what your tap actually delivers, and what your sprinkler actually puts on the ground. Neither is in any listing.

Feeding & repair

Scarify, aerate, overseed, top dress, feed: the renovation sequence, its two windows, and the test that comes first.

Renovating a tired lawn, in one weekend and the right order The whole renovation is five operations in a fixed order, done inside one of two windows in the year. Done in that order it holds for seasons; done piecemeal, each operation undoes some of the last.

Servicing & storing

The hour in October that decides whether the machine starts in March, for petrol, cordless and mains.

Putting it away, so that it starts in March Nearly every machine that will not start in March was put away wrong in October. The work takes an hour per machine, it is the same hour every year, and the alternative is a workshop queue in the first warm week.