Cutting the lawn when is wet

Apart from the obvious safety concerns regarding grass becoming slippery when wet, especially when cutting banks or slopes, mowing your lawn when it is wet can also damage your lawn and prevent it from looking neat and tidy. Most typical lawnmowers collect the grass by first cutting the grass with a blade, then by vacuuming it up from the ground in quick succession. Wet grass makes this very difficult, as it is much heavier than dry grass. This prevents the grass from being collected efficiently and often leads to grass being left on the ground which then requires the user to go around and rake up the leftover grass clippings from the lawn or blocking the underside of the deck or grass chute.

Wet grass is also more likely to clump. It sticks together more easily, again making it difficult for the lawnmower to propel the grass into the collection box. As it sticks together it can then clump around the collection box inlets, which then prevents grass from entering.

This again results in more grass being left on the lawn leaving the garden looking untidy. If you plan on adding stripes to your lawn then you will need to use a rotary lawnmower with a roller. This adds another risk to the equation when mowing your lawn — soil compaction. The heavy roller which flattens the grass to create the stripes can cause the spaces between the wet soil particles to become smaller, preventing essential water and oxygen from reaching the grassroots, preventing healthy grass growth.

Want to add stripes to your lawn but don't know how? If you do, here are some tips:. Sharpen those blades — the sharper the better anyway, but especially if trying to cut wet grass. Lift the deck height up, the higher the better with wet grass — fewer grass clumps to jam your machine. Only fill your fuel tank up with as much as required. Slow and steady and more often. This will badly affect your lawn levels and cause significant deviation in the height of your finished grass cut.

When moving a lawnmower over wet soil, there is a chance that the mower could become bogged. After a mower gets stuck, the turf underneath will likely get ripped up, leaving the area bare without any grass, but will also leave big ruts in the soil. As these ruts can be quite large, topsoil may be required to bring the levels back up again. Mowing the lawn when the grass is wet can become a more labour-intensive task as the mower will require extra force to push through.

The extra effort required to push the mower also causes a potential risk of slipping. This risk of slipping over will become greater if you are mowing on a slope. Slipping over when operating a mower with fast rotating blades will not only give you a fright but can be a significant safety hazard for obvious reasons.

Golf courses and some other facilities have no choice but to mow their grass nice and early when there is dew still on the surface and they manage to keep their grass beautifully manicured. But if you do have the option to wait until the dew has dissipated, then it would be best to do so in the home lawn situation. Zoysia grasses have a high silica content within the leaf blade making them strong and robust. This means that these grasses require a sharp mower blade that can ensure a nice clean cut every time.

With zoysia grasses specifically, a small amount of moisture on the leaf can actually be beneficial to cutting and can help the blade cut cleaner when using a cylinder mower. So, if you are tossing up between mowing or not mowing your lawn while it is still wet, it is best to let the area dry out a bit further. This way you will be able to keep your lawn in its best shape. For more mowing tips and advice, check out more of our blogs here.