Brilliant - thanks for your advice. I’ll give it a month or so first then to see how it gets on after being mowed. Plenty of other jobs to be getting on with in the meantime.
It looks to me as if the grass was kept mowed until fairly recently. It depends on what standard of lawn you want. Billiard board with stripes or an average level green area for family use. I would start cutting now, with the mower set at its highest setting, only taking off a few inches each time it is cut, it could take cutting twice a week for several weeks, to slowly reduce the length. It doesn't look as if it has lumps and bumps to me, the longer you take to start mowing it, the longer the grass will grow, making your job much harder. Grass is growing very quickly now. From the lushnest and colour, I am guessing it was probably fairly well looked after previously. It will look awful when you first start cutting it, with patches of different colour all over it where the long grass has blocked light from the shorter blades, and rough tufts, this will soon even out. It can take a year or two to bring back a neglected lawn but you seem to have a head start with yours. I wouldn't worry about reseeding yet, you may not need to do any at all.Give the lawn time to recover and if necessary, reseed next year. The bare strip where you want to remove the path is a completely seperate problem as there will probably be hardcore underneath the concrete which will need removing. Then you will have a trench to back fill, level, settle etc. before sowing grass seed. It will take a few years for the new strip to blend into the original lawn area. The strip will need to be firmly compacted before seed sowing or you will end up with a sunken strip of lawn. It is surprising how much soil sinks after being dug over.
Posts
A friend came round and seems to think it would benefit from scarification - what do you think?