Novice - moss, dandelions and patchy grass

[TheAmusedQuail]

As with the title really.

My lawn is plagued by moss, is full of dandelions and very very patchy.

What should I buy to get rid of the moss and weeds and fill the patchiness? It'll be even more bald once the moss and weeds are gone. I don't have a clue and am a useless gardener.

Thank you

Moss tends to mean your lawn is shady and/or badly drained. If that’s the case then grass will be unhappy there and moss will become happy. You need to spike the lawn to improve drainage - chemicals won’t solve the underlying problem. YouTube is your friend here.

Many garden centres or tool hire places with hire out a hollow tine lawn spike / airator which makes lots of evenly spaced holes in your lawn (and pulls out plugs of earth which you'll need to remove / sweep up). Then if you brush sharp sand across the lawn to fill the holes, you'll go a long way to improving the drainage and eradicating the moss. The previous poster is correct: chemicals are not the solution.

Once sorted, you can get the weed and feed treatment done by companies like green thumb. I ditched that a couple of years ago and am now trying to get more diversity into the lawn with clover, violets dandelions etc. Much nicer than boring grass.

I am not an expert by any stretch but this is what I would do:

1. scoop out the worst weeds, dandelions etc with a narrow little hand trowel aiming to get the root if possible.
2. rake with a fine pronged rake to get as much moss up as you can. After this it will look worse with bald patches. You will be aching from all the bending over weeding and back breaking raking. You’ll probably wonder why you ever started on this project.
3. aerate the lawn - make lots and lots of narrow holes about 2 inches deep to improve drainage etc. you can use a garden fork or a specialist tool.
4. sprinkle sone building sand all over.
5. sprinkle grass seed. There are different blends available depending on sun / shade levels, how tough you need it etc.
6. water regularly for several weeks.
7. about a month later, after seeing no signs of improvement and just as you are on the brink of giving up and ordering rolls of new turf to lay, new grass will start to appear and your lawn will start to look just a little bit better than it did before you began.
8. rejoice!

Repeat process next Spring.

Get out the dandelions and other weeds and let the moss do it's thing. It's green.

We did all that Taupe above said (and I confirm it is back breaking!) and there was more moss the following year. It can win this battle!