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Hi, I have brown, dry patches on my lawn. What can I do to revive these areas - top dress/fertiliser? The soil is sandy.
Welcome to the Bunnings Workshop community @meera2026. It's brilliant to have you join us, and many thanks for your question about lawn care.
Adding top dressing and fertiliser will help, but it’s important to first work out why that patch is struggling. You can do a simple test for grubs by mixing a squirt of dishwashing detergent into a litre of water and flooding the area between the brown patch and healthy grass. Wait about 30 minutes. If grubs or beetles come to the surface, they are likely eating the roots. In that case, you can treat the area with a grub control product before improving the soil.
For sandy soil and a buffalo lawn, a quick and effective fix is to cut out a rectangle around the brown patch, add fresh topsoil, and lay new turf. This will give you an instant result, rather than waiting for the grass to fill in naturally.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Mitchell
Thanks for your response Mitchell. I’ll go with your suggestion to replace that piece of turf. There doesn’t seem to be any grubs after testing.
I have some more diffuse brown patches on the lawn elsewhere. What would you suggest for maintenance and ongoing management (see attached)?
No worries at all, glad the grub test came back clear @meera2026.
For the more diffuse brown patches, a good maintenance approach is to top dress those areas lightly with a quality sandy loam or lawn top dress and then fertilise. If you want a quick boost, a liquid fertiliser like PowerFeed applied at the lawn rate will help kick things along. For longer-term improvement, follow that up with a slow-release lawn fertiliser to steadily build strength and colour. Consistent watering after feeding is key, especially with sandy soil, as that will help the nutrients move into the root zone and encourage the grass to thicken up and fill in over time.
Mitchell
