Growth Regulators & Mowing Tips

G'day guys, Hugo here from The Lawn IQ. Today I want to take the time to talk to you about mowing, growth regulators and all the things that people around Australia are dealing with at the moment. December's a busy time for growth, it's a busy time for Christmas, and it's a busy time for storms. All of those different things bring about some issues with taking care of your lawn. First of all, I want to talk about the growth regulators that we have on The Lawn IQ website, Amigo 120 ME, and we also have a bit of Primo Maxx II as well. Growth regulators are awesome if you're stepping away for a week here or a week there at a time. These guys will hold your lawn at bay at maximum rate for up to about four weeks. They're super easy to apply, obviously liquid application, you'll want it through a pressurised spray pack, definitely nothing hose on, and you can apply it to all different lawn types. We even have growth regulators, if you jump on and have a look at the Trimmit, for using it on bushes, hedges, things like that, that also give you an excellent result as well. So again, all of our products, completely safe for the kids, the dogs, there's no problems there at all. If you can't keep up with the storm season and the growth rate, and as you can see, this lawn here is absolutely getting away, we obviously tend to our trusty friend, the mower. So I'll take the opportunity to talk about some of the mowing rules, or a mowing rule, a key mowing rule, which is the one-third leaf rule. When we're looking at mowing a lawn, we've obviously got the leaf here. This is a great buffalo lawn, so super easy to see, big wide leaf. We want to make sure that we never mow off more than a third of the leaf at any one time. That means that the plant has plenty of leaf exposure there to still pick up enough sunlight to create those carbohydrates and for the plant to be able to then recover easily as well. Look, it's a general guide while we're here and we're looking at a buffalo lawn. I personally, in Queensland, would be looking at a buffalo lawn at around about 30mm. You can get away with it up to 40mm but as you'll see a lot in American videos, the floratam and other products like that, they're up to sort of 70mm What you need to be aware of, particularly in high humidity places like Darwin, Rocky, Cairns, even down as far south as Brisbane, if your canopy gets too thick, you're creating a perfect breeding ground for all sorts of pests. Having a really dense, thick canopy looks great, but it can produce a lot of problems down the track. So if you want to learn any more about fungicides or how to identify a fungus in your lawn, jump onto our Instagram page, have a look through there, and the video will be there. So this is a pretty stock standard mower that you'll see in most backyards around Australia. I think it's important before you jump into it, just to make sure that you set your mower up nice and high if you're not doing it, and this lawn has been mowed infrequently, to set your mower up nice and high, do a test area, again, making sure that we're only taking off sort of one third of that leaf canopy, just that little bit at the top there. And if you're wanting to get your lawn down a little bit lower, what I would suggest is more regularly mowing during your week, so you might do two or three mows during your week, constantly just taking off a little bit by a little bit at a time. Who's paying who here again? So a big question I get asked all the time is, to catch or not to catch? On most lawns, if you're mowing them regularly enough, it's purely personal preference. On a lawn like this, where we're taking off a substantial amount of leaf, I would definitely say always catch, because what can happen is the clip can come out of the mower like that there. And if it sits in a mound, what'll happen is that'll start to decompose and it'll create what we talk about on the turf farm as a clip burn, and you'll actually have a burnt spot of turf or grass underneath that patch on your next mow. So definitely on a lawn like this, catch. And as you can see, we're gonna have quite a few catch loads. So another question is, is what do I do with all this catch? Ideally, you wanna be able to compost it down. You can obviously also put it in your green waste bin. The other one is, a lot of people do put it into their garden beds. So just be mindful though, if you are putting this into your garden bed, there can be different seeds. There can be stolons of green couch and things like that in there. Given enough water, or if they get buried, those stolons can certainly, or those seeds can certainly continue to grow in your garden beds, and then you can have grass within your garden beds. If your grass layer does get too thick in your garden beds, lawn clip is renowned for becoming quite thick and quite impenetrable. And it can choke large root zones around trees, and also obviously smaller plants and shrubs as well. So when you're dumping that clip into the garden, if that's your preferred option, just try to keep it into the low light areas. So obviously less sunlight, less likely for any of the seed or the weeds to be able to continue to grow in those areas. And also obviously too, as I said before, just avoiding the thick large roots of the bigger trees, because this can also choke those out as well.