Making patterns on your turf is a fun and innovative way to distinguish your lawn from the neighbor’s and enjoy their admiration (or jealousy). More surprisingly, it brings some benefits to your outdoor landscape and lawn health.

If you want to know how to make a grid pattern in the grass with a lawnmower, keep reading!

Some Other Unknown Benefits Of Grid-patterned Lawns

Do you know that in addition to adding aesthetics, grid-patterned lawns bring many benefits?

Hide Minor Imperfections In Lawn

Grid pattern lawn gives a feeling that the lawn perfectly cares all around the year, therefore, some of its minor imperfections such as dry spots are perfectly hidden.

Enhance Your Lawn Health

How? – you might ask.

Mowing the lawn in a grid pattern means that it is mowed at a higher cutting height so that the grass can develop a stronger, larger root system underground and get more leaf area to perform photosynthesis.

Less Damage To The Lawn

Mowing a lawn at the same pattern year after year is prone to cause damage to the whole area or some certain zones. The reason is repetitive tire tracks put pressure on the turf every mowing time will make the grass compacted, therefore, encourage diseases and reduce ventilation.

When diseases develop, weeds get more chances to invalid your lawn or there are many unaesthetic dead grass spots that appear.

From that point, regularly changing mowing patterns on your lawn helps minimize such that damage

How A Grid Pattern In The Grass Is Created?

To create a grid-pattern lawn is actually to create an illusion to the viewer by bending the grass at different angles, then they reflect the sunlight differently.

This cool illusion makes the lawn look like it is grown by different types of grass seed or cut at different heights. In general, it feels like the lawn owner might put a lot of effort and skill to maintain it but in fact, it’s not! Haha

How to Make a Grid Pattern in the Grass With a Lawnmower

Preparation: You’ll need a fully-fueled lawnmower with a sharp blade and a roller (or a striping kit) on the back.

Now, why is there a roller?

As stated above, a grid pattern is created when the grass is bent in a certain direction. A roller (or a striping kit) contacted on the back of your lawnmower will bend the grass farther to help increase the grid pattern.

Where to buy a striping kit?

In our area, it is very easy to buy a striping kit at lawn equipment and tool stores. But you can buy it online, which is more convenient, especially during the current pandemic situation.

Instructions:

At one end of the lawn, run your lawnmower in the 1st pass across one side of your lawn. Then, in the opposite direction of the 1st pass, make the 2nd one that is paralleled to it.

Do the same thing with the 3rd pass (which is paralleled to the two previous and in the opposite direction to the 2nd), and more until you go to the other end of your lawn. Make sure paces between passes are equal to each other.

Now, mow in a perpendicular direction to the 1st line to create a grid pattern.

Again, keep an equal pace between them for the best looking.

Once you’ve done mowing, start rolling the roller over the 1st pass and skip every other stripe. Make sure to roll it in the same direction as when you were mowing it.

Extra Tips For The Best Grid Pattern Effects In Your Lawn

If you want to make your turf look sharp and as if it’s mowed by a professional, use these tips:

Choose the right grass

According to our experience, warm-season grass isn’t as easy to bend as cool-season ones because they are harder and more rigid. Therefore, for the best grid pattern effects on your lawn, choose cool-season grasses if possible.

Use a hardscape feature as a guide

While you can’t use a ruler and a pencil to sketch grid patterns on the turf to keep the lines straight, an easy trick is to rely on a hardscape feature available on your lawn. For example, driveway, fence, or sidewalk.

Wait until your lawn reach the ideal height

To accentuate the lawn stripes, it’s worth waiting for the grass to grow at least 2”-2.5”. If you can wait more, let the turf reach up to 3” or 3.5” before starting to mow.

That small amount will bring a huge difference in the grid pattern effects because longer grass blades are easier to be bent than the shorter ones. Not saying that it requires less mowing time.

Conclusion

It’s easy to make a grid pattern in the grass with a lawnmower, right? Please take note that the grid pattern effects might look different at various times during the day and season to season because of the change in sunlight levels.

That’s all for this article. Thanks for reading!