If You Ever Need To Seed More Than Once, You Have The Wrong Grass Seed

The chairman of The Lawn Association, David Hedges Gower, explains why you may be using the wrong grass seed on your lawns.
It’s amazing how many people see failure as a form of success. In every walk of life, you have to fail to succeed of course, but when it comes to lawns, most of the UK’s are never seeded, yet it remains dense, green, and healthy without any human intervention. After all, we don’t seed fields, verges, mountains, or even parks. Yet UK lawns are often re-seeded every year or so. So why do they fail when so many older lawns (anything built pre-1995) remain in good condition? Well, it’s all about species choice. Read on to find out if you know the difference when looking at the grasses in your lawn.

The Problem: Dwarf Ryegrass
Today, we’ve been led down a certain path, and that path is called dwarf ryegrass. It originate from a cattle feed grass—designed to grow fast so livestock can graze. And now, it has been bred it for domestic lawns.But here’s the issue: it’s not just bad for lawns, it’s also an unsustainable way to manage them, especially with our changing environments. This grass is sold as a dream, but this dream is guaranteed to end in a reduction of lawn grass population, requiring new seed next year and the year after that. And forever, if you want to keep grass on your lawn year-round.Sure, it germinates in the UK. Yes, it’s green. And for a few months—after heavy watering, feeding, mowing, and chemical treatments—it looks okay. But long-term? It won’t survive well at all.

A Flawed System
When you have an accepted but failing system like this, it creates an opportunity—one that lawn treatment companies, seed sellers, and fertiliser manufacturers are all too happy to exploit. It’s no coincidence that we see posts from various influencers mainly between March and October—right when the reseeding begins.Meanwhile, many lawns with native grasses just sit there, thick and dense, all year round. Why? Because native grasses spread themselves for free. Grass verges that have been around for hundreds of years remain better than most modern lawns. Areas with high traffic—like castle grounds, hillsides with grazing sheep and cattle—all outperform many domestic lawns.

Is It a Scam, or Just Convenient?
I used to think this was a deliberate con where they knew exactly what would happen. Maybe it still is. Or maybe it’s just a case of finding out something doesn’t work, but keeping quiet about it because it benefits those selling seed, top dressing, water, and fertilisers.

The Sustainability Myth
“Sustainability” is a word often thrown around in horticulture, but I often shake my head at what people think it means (and that’s another story). Failed lawns are not sustainable. We wouldn’t accept this level of failure from a tree or a flower bed, so why accept it in our lawns?But without real knowledge in the gardening media world, failure succeeds—because we’re sold a dream by commercial interests, and without questioning it, that dream eventually becomes ‘fact.’So, if you think “grass is just grass,” you might be walking down that same garden path.For more information on upcoming events or to learn more about soil care, visit The Lawn Association’s website www.lawnassociation.org.uk 
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