Wimbledon as a model: the difficult path to a green paradise

Wimbledon.

Tennis on grass.

On lawn?

Who came up with something like that?

You can

find it

and already very wacky.

But as a practitioner I say: You can learn a lot there for your own garden.

For example, during Corona I not only developed a close relationship with Karl Lauterbach, but also with our garden, which I didn't even know we had for a long time.

Then a few weeks ago I decided, actually it was my wife, that we should make a lawn out of the hard court in our garden.

In a specialist book (“Step by Step to a Green Paradise”) we read that you first have to verticulate the ground for this.

I liked the word, my wife liked the idea.

We bought a verticulator and plowed the hard court with it.

Something like that is not good for the look at all.

Now it finally looks like on Mars, you can see Jeff Bezos almost already in the landing approach.

I don't want to bother you further with impressions of the following development of our project, just this much: It was a disaster.

Perhaps it was because we spread the lawn seeds with a salad strainer during light snowfall, although the problem was probably not the salad strainer.

What more could you want from the blade of grass?

Back to Wimbledon: You can think what you want of the island snobs, one thing is for sure: they can lawn.

Maybe not all of them, but definitely Neil Stubley.

Stubley has been leading lawn production and maintenance at Wimbledon since time immemorial.

If you take a closer look at him and his job, you can quickly see what you've done wrong in the garden at home.

It starts with the choice of grass.

You just have to buy the right seed, and you don't need a Nobel Prize in Horticulture for that, just a solid basic knowledge is enough.

Although British, Stubley recommends German ryegrass for sowing.

, fast growing, resilient - what more could you want from a blade of grass?

Even the theory of lawn care seems straightforward: a cut to eight millimeters. Shorten two millimeters every day. Check the hardness of the soil. Water. Cut the lawn mower strips to 91 centimeters. Rollers. A perfect lawn is absolutely doable, as you can see, especially when there is nothing else to do. We will definitely tackle it next year. Bezos has to end up somewhere else. If we feel like it, we can play a round of tennis,

in our new green paradise.