Lawn Striping Kit - Do I Need It & How To Make It?

The Lawn Striping. Beautiful sketch on your backyard that looks amazing. How does that occur? What kind of tools can you use to achieve some cool stripes in your yard? So, let’s talk about that today.

Table of Contents

What Is Lawn Striping?

So, the first question is, what is lawn striping, and how does it occur? So, it’s a straightforward process. Many people think that you have to cut the grass at a different height or do certain things to achieve the stripe look, but it’s not that difficult. It merely’s bending of the grass blades.

The easiest thing I can tell you is that if you think about a material like velvet, it has a lighter or a darker look when you brush it in different directions. Well, the same thing happens with grass blades. When you bend the grass in one direction and then come back in the next pass in the opposite direction, and when you look at it behind the sun, you’re going to see those stripes because of the bending of the grass and just the way that light is coming off of those grass blades.

Another easy way to explain this is this little flap here on the back of the mower. Now, it’s intended as a safety feature so that anything that’s underneath the deck doesn’t come flying back out here. But what it also does is allows this grass to bend as it goes. Now, there’s not much weight here, but you will see that the grass is bending slightly.

And then that is going to help to put the stripe down. So, there are many things that I’ve tried over the years, putting some weight on here. Some things work to a varying degree, but it likes to go like that when you back up and weigh this thing. And then it ends up underneath the mower. So, that’s the only problem with doing something like that.

Do I need to level my lawn before making stripes?

It is unnecessary, but I strongly recommend doing it with Standard Golf Levelawn Rake (aff link) for aesthetic pleasure.

Is lawn striping bad for grass?

Lawn striping is a good practice for grass growing.

What is the best grass for striping?

If you do have warm-season grass, it’s not that you can’t get any stripes out of it. I’ve seen some Bermuda and Zoysia that have had some pretty good stripes in it. Look here to see my guide about the lawn grasses.

In general, the cold season stuff is going to have a better stripe to it. Remember that the taller that the grass is, the more defined the stripe will usually be. So, if you’ve got tall fescue or you got bluegrass, and it’s at three inches, so on those taller grasses, you’re usually going to get more of a defined stripe.

But I’m also cutting at three-quarters of an inch up on the front yard here and with all rollers on my real mower. You’ll see that I’m still getting stripes out of that because I’m rolling the grass and bending those grass plates so that the light is showing the stripes.

How do you stripe a lawn without a striping kit?

Basically, there is no special way and no special tools needed: it’s just laying the grass down certain ways that the grass lays down the way the light hits, but it gives you a darker effect this way and our lighter effect this way. So you want to follow the light stripes as your mowing, so that’s when we touch. I tell our employees to follow the light that gives you that it tells you which direction you need to be in.

We try to keep our blades up to three and a half to four inches tall high that way, and it gives you a little bit more of a Bend which gives you a more serious effect. This is the reason you see them better on the baseball fields; they’re up higher.

Where To Buy Lawn Striping System?

The next option you have is to get what is usually called a striping kit of some kind. I think the best lawn striping kit is the Toro Lawn Striping System (Amazon link), this thing that attaches to the back of your mower.

I got this roller, this little comb to comb up the grass and then roll it back down when this roller goes over it. You put sand in here, and then when it’s rolling along, you’re going to be bending down the grass again and getting your stripes.

The same company makes that one for the Toro right there makes them for pretty much any other push mower you can use. I happen to have gotten one of those, and I’m going to attach it to my Honda mower today and show you what kind of work we can do with it.

Toro Lawn Striping System – What is in the box?

The first thing you’re going to notice in the box is this little label right here that tells you exactly how to put it on and make sure that it’s at the correct angle. So, we’ll save that for a second here. The first thing I need to do here is to remove this little plug, and I need to put some sand in here for some weight.

So, it says anywhere between 16 and 20 pounds of sand, and I didn’t measure the weight precisely, but I’m just going to fill this thing up as much as possible. Weight is going to help to bend those grass plates and get a better-defined stripe.

So, I got that thing filled up. Now I’m just going to tighten this again. Make sure that it goes down past this little ridge that’s cut out because you don’t want it hitting on the roller and that this thing can go around like that. And by the way, I got two because my neighbor bought one of these and used it, so I checked him to see how much weight was in his, and it looks like we got about the same.

All right. The so first thing is, this goes around the handlebar, should have these little teeth. I got these in the way here, but you want it about a third of the way up the actual handlebar here. So, I’m going to try it about there.

This piece to go in here. On the first couple of tries here, I would say that any metal-to-metal connections are slightly stiff with the paint. Once you get them in there, it’s friendly and secure, but it was a little challenging to wear off a little of that paint on these metal-to-metal connections. But you just got to fiddle with it a little bit until you get those things right.

So, there’s the first set of stripes, and I’m telling you, it’s quite impressive that just a roller can give you those results, but that’s what it does. And that’s only just bending the grass down. And the sunlight is at the correct angle here, coming from this direction, looking this way, and you’ll see the stripes well-defined like that.

How to Cut Diagonal Lines on Your Lawn?

Now, I don’t think that I can stop there. We need some 45-degree angle stripes in there. See how that looks. Give it a little more of a pop to it than just the straight stripes. So let’s give that a try.

Okay. And there we have it. The double mower is done. I got some stripes in this direction, some stripes in the other direction—the more you go over this thing, the more these lines would get defined.

Now, you don’t want to mow in the same direction every single time, but if you did go over it a couple of times, two, three times in the same pattern, that’d be considered what’s called burning in of your pattern. And it will get much more defined. There’s a couple of things that I like about this roller here that I want to show you as well.

The on and off part of it is a big deal because I like to go around the corners first. And just having this thing on there, it’s okay, but the whole point of a push mower is that you can get into corners back up quickly. So, just taking that off is a big selling point because it’s so easy to remove, put back on and then you can use it when you want it and remove it when you don’t want it.

You might also think that you don’t ever want to remove it but think about using your mower for renovations or things like that, where you don’t want a roller on there.

You don’t want to be doing any striping at that point; you’re doing some renovation work. Having the ease of that coming on and off is a big thing for me.

The other thing is that many of these are stationarily attached to the mower, so you’ll have brackets on each side, and it’ll just be fixed in one position. And fine again with that situation, it will give you great stripes.

But the fact that this thing turns is nice because going around corners or doing circles or patterns with more of a zigzag, the fact that this follows the mower helps you make that pattern.

And you’re also not digging into the lawn with it being stationary. So, there’s a couple of other things to consider when talking about lawn striping. One is that cool-season grasses will, in general, stripe a little bit better than warm-season grasses.

Lawn Striping Patterns – Video Instructions

The best option is to see how to make them on the videos 🙂

DIY Striping Kit?

What Will You Need?

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Step-by-step Guide – Lawn Striping Kit

You’ll need to measure how much space you have between the back wheels of your mower.
Measure this out on your PVC pipe
Cut PVC pipe
Drill a hole in the center of the cap
Take bolt, add several nuts on it and add brackets on each one
Put the bolt through the cap
Put a lock washer on and a Hex Lock Nut and tighten that down from the inside.
Lock one side of PVC pipe
Add sand to the pipe
Lock another side of the pipe
Done!