Finish It Before the Ferns Turn: Late-Summer Landscaping in the South Hams
August 21, 2026
Ask a greenkeeper when lawns are really made and they will not say spring — they will say September. The soil is still warm from summer, the rain is (usually) back, and grass has weeks of good growing weather left to recover from anything you do to it. The same goes for hedges: with bird nesting season behind us, September is the first month you can cut hard with a clear conscience. A weekend or two of work this month pays for itself every month until June.
Scarifying: the ugly job that works
Over a summer of mowing, a layer of dead grass, moss and debris — thatch — builds up at the base of a lawn. It chokes airflow, holds moisture in exactly the wrong way, and gives moss its winter head start. A Lawn Scarifier (from £55 excl. VAT) rakes it all out mechanically. Fair warning we give everyone: the lawn looks worse before it looks better, sometimes dramatically so. That is the job working. Scarify in early September and the grass has recovered before growth stops; leave it until late October and it goes into winter bare.
Follow it with a Lawn Aerator (from £60), which relieves a summer’s worth of compaction — garden furniture, football, dry ground — and lets air and water back down to the roots. Scarify, aerate, overseed, and next spring’s lawn is decided in a weekend.
Hedges: cut hard, cut now
From September you can tackle hedges properly. A Hedge Trimmer (from £30) handles the routine faces; for the tall boundary hedges the South Hams specialises in — those twelve-foot walls of escallonia and laurel between you and the weather — the Long Reach Hedge Trimmer (from £37.50) keeps both feet on the ground where they belong. A hard cut now regrows just enough to look tidy before winter, then holds its shape until spring.
After the machines: seed, feed and leave it alone
The machines do the surgery; the fortnight afterwards does the healing. Overseed straight after scarifying and aerating — the seed falls into the grooves and holes the machines have made, which is precisely the point of doing all three together. Water it in if September is being dry, give it an autumn feed (high in potassium, low in nitrogen — you want root growth now, not a flush of soft top growth going into winter), and then stay off it for a couple of weeks. By late October it will have knitted together; by April it will be the lawn the neighbours ask about.
One scheduling tip from the hire counter: scarifiers are like barbecues — everyone wants one the same weekend. The first dry weekend after a wet spell in September is peak demand, so book a few days ahead rather than chancing a Saturday-morning walk-in.
Dealing with what you’ve cut down
Every September hedge job produces a mountain of brash, and a mountain of brash produces either six trips to the tip or one afternoon with a chipper. The Timberwolf 6 inch Petrol Wood Chipper eats branches up to 6 inches thick and turns the mountain into a heap of chip you can actually use — mulch for beds, cover for muddy paths, or a winter’s worth of hen-run bedding. A Leaf Blower (from £25) finishes the clear-up, and gets another outing in October when the trees let go.
Why not just leave it until spring?
It is the reasonable question, and the answer is about what grass and moss are each doing over winter. Grass more or less stops growing below about five degrees; moss does not care and carries on colonising happily through a mild, wet South Hams winter. Scarify in spring and you rip out the winter’s moss but leave the lawn thin just as the growing season starts — and thin turf in April is an open invitation to weeds. Scarify in September and the grass repairs the gaps before winter while the moss loses its head start. Spring work has its place (a light rake, a feed), but the heavy renovation belongs to autumn. The greenkeepers are right about this one.
The other honest answer is workload: September you have time, ground conditions and daylight. March you have mud, a backlog, and every other job in the garden shouting at once.
Make a weekend of it
Scarifier and aerator on the Saturday, hedge trimmer and chipper on the Sunday — or split it across two weekends and let the lawn recover between rounds. We deliver across Ivybridge, Kingsbridge, Modbury, Salcombe and the wider South Hams, timed to suit you (our Ivybridge yard is delivery-only, so phone rather than call in: 01752 922535, or email hire@olympushiresouthhams.co.uk). The full Garden and Landscaping range is online. Your spring lawn is waiting to be decided.
