In article , Ben H
writes
I want to stop my lawn from turning into straw in the hot weather.

There's a threaded water tap in the back wall of my house.

The one thing you *don't* want to do with your lawn is water it. This is
a knee jerk reaction to a couple of days of dry weather in this country,
and is an appalling waste of water.

When grass goes brown it is its way of conserving moisture, of which
there is normally plenty in the soil. Left alone, grass will put down
long roots to search for the moisture it needs; watering will only bring
the roots up to the surface looking for moisture, and then you have to
keep giving it to them. In other word, you need to train or acclimatise
your grass to being without water, so that it looks for its own. It may
look like straw, but it is still alive and the first real rain will make
it green again. I recall driving past Oxted Golf Course in Surrey at
this time of year about 10 or 12 years ago, when we had a real drought.
The grass was absolutely brown; the only green colour being on the
greens, which had been watered. When I went back that way about 6 weeks
later, after some heavy autumn rain, all the grass was a verdant green.

Of course, it may be that your soil in sandy or thin above rubble or
lacking in humus and nutrients, or you have a type of grass that needs
lots of water. When they built a golf course near here some years ago,
they stripped off all the natural topsoil, imported a special sandy soil
and planted it with Bermuda Bent. Now they have to water it all the
time.

Do you cut your grass with a box on the mower, chuck the cuttings in the
hedge, and feed it with an artificial fertiliser? Don't! Let the
cuttings fall back onto the grass, unless they are very long and wet, so
that they build up humus. Consider adding some humus-rich topsoil or
even a layer of compost. You will soon find that the lawn improves and
stays green.

I have a large lawn which is, admittedly, partly shaded by a wood, so it
doesn't get sun on it until the afternoon. Part of it was actually a
vegetable garden which was allowed to revert to grass without any
sowing. For years I have cut it with a Flymo early in the year or when
the weather is wet, but during the dry weather I have used a cylinder
mower and collected the cuttings for the compost heap. Nothing I do
stops it growing; it is rich and green and has never ever shown any sign
of going brown. Indeed, now I am getting older I wish I could stop it
growing so well!

Needless to say, I *never* water it.
--
Roy Bailey
West Berkshire.