Lawn problem - Ants?!

penny.purplecAHPi5pf · May 2021

Last year my lawn was devastated by something (see image with lots of circular patches and brown straight lines going horizontally & vertically). I raked it and put down new grass seed down only in the bald patches and it sort of saw me through the second half of Summer but never looked great. Early this Spring it started looking bad so I had it scarified and put loads of new seed down a few weeks ago, which is now growing nicely, but again I'm seeing these straight lines appear and patches are looking bad already and I think I am seeing ant hills with little mounds of earth in patches. Hopefully the images show the problem. Worried it's heading in the same direction again! So.... thoughts would be greatly appreciated on cause and solutions so I might have any kind of decent lawn this year! Thanks in advance, Penny.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6030279/uploads/editor/3e/8butc7ue139f.jpg

Lizzie27 · May 2021

Could be a combination of ants and cranefly who lay their eggs in lawns. A good soaking with a hosepipe should see off the ants but you might have to use biological nemotodes for the cranefly. Hopefully another poster may have better or more detailed advice.

JennyJ · May 2021

Daft question maybe, but have you checked the blades, wheels etc on your mower? In the first pic it looks like you could be cutting lower on one side than the other and scalping one side of each strip.

I'm also wondering about what might be underneath because the second pic reminds me of parch marks that archeologists use to spot underlying remains of structures.

Lawn problem - Ants?!

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