Mowing Height for the First Mow?

[l008com]

Common wisdom is that you should mow your lawn tall during the summer to keep it healthy (and in my opinion, nicer looking and more pleasant to walk on).

Then in the fall you should start mowing it short to help it survive the Winter.

This leads me to two question:

First, how do you transition from short Winter to Spring? Should you mow it short the first few times and ease into tall mowing? Or is that pointless? Should you just start right at a tall setting on your first mowing of the year and stick with it till October?

Second, I do mow my lawn short for the Winter. Then the rabbit infestation spends all winter eating the short grass down to almost nothing. Given that, does it make more sense to leave my long tall for the Winter so that theres something left by Spring? Or will doing that just mean EVEN more rabbit poop but the same end result?

 

[Tetters]

As long as the first couple of cuts are what I call ''sensible'' and future cuts remain ''sensible'' your grass will thrive. In very hot or very cold weather maybe a notch longer, but never scalped. So for the majority of the time over the course of the year, my mower stays on the same height. I have even chopped it during frosty times if it's too long. Grass usually looks after itself then.
I have run a camping site over the last 40 odd years. Some campers almost killed the grass dead, but it all grew back again - without exception. No worries. No special treatment needed.

PS I never call it lawn. It is grass to me. I get glowing comments on the site, so I might be doing something right.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

I think the grass length is arranged mainly for the humans rather than the grass. It is heck of a tough stuff that has been around for a few million years longer than most wild flowers and has learned to survive trees , grazing animals, and huge weather changes

 

[l008com]

So let me clarify a little.

I don't simply want my lawn to keep existing... I also want it to look thick and beautiful

And in theory feel great on your bare feet. Of course it's a sea of rabbit poop now so you can't walk on it barefoot anyway. But in theory I would like to.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

The best thing for thick and beautiful is a bit of regular fertilising. You can get specialist grass fertilisers, but any good all round fertiliser will do, and tomato fertiliser is often much cheaper. The other thing which definitely helps is to go over it from time to time with a mechanical rake or scarifier and take out all the dead grass and moss and damage he weed roots. It can be done by hand with a wire rake, but it's a lot of hard work

 

[Victorthesecond]

For me, here in the NorthWest UK, I choose to mow long in winter and shorter in summer...So, the process I prefer is:

- For the first cut in Spring, it's just about taking the top off the grass.
- As the weather gets warmer, I lower the mower blades to end up with grass that is longer than a golf green, but around the height of a fariway (yes, I'm a golfer!)
- A light scarify in Spring is never, I think, a bad thing to do. Not just after the first cut, but when the ground is warming up (so April / May) and the grass is being cut a little shorter. I use lawn sand to get rid of any moss (before scarifying) and will also use a good lawnfeed to help the grass recover from winter. Depending on how much hammer the lawn has had with grandkids toys etc, I sometimes aereate the lawn with a spiked roller thing (my name for it)
- Autumn brings another light scarify and autumn lawn feed.
- Usually, my mower goes away for the winter into the shed around mid / end October, but I've found that rising temperatues and, where we live, warmer and wetter winters means that infrequent mowing can go well into November. Last year, I even mowed lightly in December - unheard of!

I agree that, ultimately, grass will look after itself. I'm one who likes the look of a nice lawn (sorry, first responder, but to me it will always be a lawn and no just grass!) And, we're not rural enough to have a rabbit infestation!