Saturday Morning With Jack Tame

Lawns and their problems  Autumn time is a great time to work on “lawns”. This is the best time to “sow” a new lawn, after totally spraying the old grasses and weeds, leaving nothing but a bare soil. Of course you can also get yourself a series of rolled-up turf mats (ready-lawn) or, as I noticed some school principals prefer, create an “all weather” playing field from artificial grass. Spare me!  My definition of a lawn is a place where you can walk from one end of the garden to the other – a pathway, low growing and easy to maintain. It can have flowers and lots of perennials; the kids can play there and birds graze the grubs from under the roots. It certainly should not be a monoculture of grass plants – trimmed to an inch of their life and meticulously cut along the edges...  You’ve got it: I really am not impressed with lawns: few ecosystem services and very low biodiversity. I prefer a prairie, where different plants come to flowering fruition – a meadow of wild flowers with lots of perennials, carrying