Spring is a great time to re-enter your garden and get your green fingers out - especially when it comes to sowing grass seeds.
Your lawn can take a battering during winter. More often than not, after mowing your lawn after the winter period you'll probably be faced with patchy areas of grass, previously hidden by the overgrowth!

Luckily, it's not all that difficult to sow grass seeds. You need a fair amount of strength and to follow our tried-and-tested tips below!

• Plan ahead: keep an eye on the weather and pick a warm weekend to lay your seeds. The two most important things seeds need to thrive is warmth and water - so plan ahead!
• Weeding: a week or so before you're planning to sow your seeds, spend an hour seeing to the weeds in your garden. Weedol or RoundUp should get rid of pesky weeds fairly quickly, leaving a blank canvas for your grass to grow.
• Rake your soil: in the areas where you want grass seeds to grow, you'll need to rake the soil to loosen the ground - a bit like creating a soft bed for your seeds to sink into!
• Add soil: pop to your local garden centre and purchase some top-quality soil. You can find some great deals on soil - so keep an eye out. You'll need this to add to the top of your old soil as the new soil will have important nutrients needed for seeds and plants to grow.
• Choosing your seeds: We'll be honest - we're not sure how well "basic" or own brand seeds grow. We usually go for a mid-range brand. There are also seeds that are designed to thrive better in shady areas, so if you're garden is mostly in shade, we'd recommend those. Most seeds come with a built-in bird repellent - but those pesky pigeons will eat anything!
• Sowing your seeds: choose a warm afternoon. Sprinkle your seeds generously all over the top soil (allow extra seeds to make up for what the pigeons eat). Finally, add a thin layer of more new soil to the top of your seeds. Once the sun has gone in, so in the evening, water your soil/lawn generously. We'd recommend using a rotating sprinkler - move it every 10 minutes or so.
• Up-keep: it can take days or a couple of weeks for your seeds to grow, but if after 3 weeks you've seen no improvement, we'd say it wasn't successful. Make sure you water the seeds daily, in the evening, if there hasn't been any rain. There are "feeding" products you can purchase to help your grass grow, too.
• Success!: once you've seen your little seedlings grow, let them grow to roughly 4 or 5cm and then mow your lawn to ensure the whole lawn is cut to the same height. Voila!

There's also the costlier option of buying turf, which is a much faster way to have a lawn in your garden, but will take just as much effort and, as previously mentioned, might cost more (as someone's already done the growing for you!).

If there's anything in your garden that's a bit trickier to accomplish, such as removing a dead tree, pruning hedges or a full-on garden clearance, GraftinGardeners are your local tree surgeons in Wimbledon. They're lovely chaps and have bags of experience, so give them a call on 0208 123 7653 for a free quotation and see if they can help you!