The lawn in winter 
There's plenty you can be doing now to give the lawn the best protection over the winter months. Scarifying and aeration are the priorities. Existing lawns will benefit from scarification to lift out dead grass, moss and thatch, using a scarifier attachment on the garden tractor or a walk-behind scarifier. Cut the lawn quite short to begin with and work the scarifier first in one direction and then across the first pass.
Collect the debris afterwards with the collector on the tractor or grass box on the mower. If you have a Countax PGC+ with scarifying cassette, you can do it all in one pass. Aeration and spiking can be done with walk-behind machines or attachments for the garden tractor. These three treatments, combined with pre-winter weeding and fertilising, will give the lawn the best possible conditions to see it through to spring next year. Thatch and moss will be removed, and good aeration will allow oxygen to the roots and good drainage.
The deeper the grass roots push down, the better the top growth will be. If you prepared the ground in August for a new lawn, now is the time to seed or lay turf. Laying turf is the more expensive route, but the result is immediate and the new lawn can be enjoyed into the rest of the autumn. Buy good quality, weed-free turf to lay at the end of the month, through October and into November.
If you are seeding, now is the time to do it, with the ground prepared. Grass seed can be sown by hand and spread in criss-cross fashion for even coverage, spreading half the seed in one direction and the other half at 90ยบ to this. The surface should then be lightly raked into the seed bed, rolled with a roller or lawn mower with roller (without the blades engaged!).
To be more accurate, you can set out areas of one metre square and the seed divided accordingly to be evenly spread. Alternatively, you can apply the seed using a seed/fertiliser spreader, which you will need to calibrate and calculate the output over a given area.
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