Hi All,

First time poster here, live in the South East of England...bit noisy
around here but hey,ho....

My lawn has been ravaged by the dog running up and down, kids playing
and shrubs overgrowing one side...this year it does not look as if it
will make its usual recovery so I've decided to reseed.

The plan is to cut back the shrubs - the main offender is a Potato Shrub
(Solanum Rantonnetii) - so the first question is whether it would be a
good time to prune this (hack it - I think is more the description)? The
other offender is a Red Dogwood. Now I don't want to kill them off and
we are still getting quite severe frosts (no snow at all this winter
though). So should I wait, or would I be safe to go out and cut these
back now?

The next issue is the seeding of the lawn itself. I bought some "One
Step" which combines fertiliser and seed. I was going to wait a few
weeks to give me more time to do the prep work and to wait for the worst
of the frost to be over. My dilemma now is that yesterday I learnt that
we are having a hose-pipe ban slapped on us. So, if I wait too long I
won't be able to water it, which will be an issue if the weather warms
up in April as it did last year...So should I go ahead and seed now and
risk the frost, or should I wait but run the risk of not being able to
provide sufficient water?

TIA
Gill