Top Dressing Your Lawn In Winter…. 🛑 It’s Not A Great Idea

Is your lawn losing colour over the cooler months? Are you tempted to top dress your lawn to improve it? If this is you, please read on.

If you remember back to school days, yes for some of us that’s could be challenging, we learnt about a thing called photosynthesis. For all plants to grow and to photosynthesise they need sunlight and some more than others. As most lawns in Australia are warm season grasses they require a minimum of 4 hours and some a minimum of 6 hours to thrive.

Along with photosynthesis plants rely on microorganisms in the soil to help convert nutrients into a usable source for the plant to use. As soil temperatures drop, microorganisms activity in the soil slows down drastically also meaning there is a lot less nutrients available for the plant to use to grow.

So with these two things combined, if you top dress your lawn in winter you will reduce photosynthesis even more as you are covering the leaf of the plant and the recovery will be even longer as the plant isn’t growing as quick so the leaves will take longer to break through the soil. So in short it’s best waiting until your lawn is actively growing and the healthier the better so that it recovers quickly.

Typically there are only a few reasons why you should top dress your lawn 1) You would like to level it 2) You would like to improve your soil. So let’s start with the first reason.

Levelling your lawn. If your lawn is uneven and you find your mower scalping areas, leave brown patches on your lawn, this is because it’s cutting all the leaf off and exposing the crown of the plant. This isn’t ideal for your lawn as it puts the plant into recovery mode meaning that all of its energy is being put into repairing the plant.

If you find yourself in this situation and would like to top dress your lawn to level it then, depending on your lawn type, late spring through to the start of Autumn is a great time to do this. Washed river sand or plasterers sand is a good option for levelling as it is a finer sand and doesn’t compact as hard as brickies sand.

If you are looking to top dress to amend your soil there is different options depending on the reason but once again late spring through to early autumn is the best timing again. Firstly if your lawn is lacking the ability to drain water, then this would mean it more than likely has a high clay content in the soil. If this is the case coring your lawn and then top dressing with washed river sand is a great option. Doing this once with not fix this issue completely, you might find that this will take a few years of repeating this to get it to where you would like it to be.

If you have sandy soil and it struggles to retain nutrients or gets hydrophobic easily, which means water runs off when you water, you can amend the soil by coring as per above but this time you would top dress with soil types such as special lawn mix or plush lawn mix. These both have more nutrients that the previously mentioned sands, a good way to look at it is the darker the soil the more nutrients is in it. Once again this is not a quick fix and will take multiple years to amend.

If you are going to top dress your lawn in any of the above ways it is best to get your lawn as healthy as possible first, also if you apply a high nitrogen fertiliser product, like our Black Label Hi-Performance, about 2 weeks prior so that the leaf of the grass is growing fast by the time you top dress, this will mean your lawn will recover quicker.

Hopefully you found this helpful, if you are looking to renovate your lawn or top dress your lawn, check out our renovation bundles and follow our application plan to make it easier.

Thank you for choosing Green Lawn Supplies for your lawn maintenance products.