Hi Adrian,
I think you said that you had your Scotty on it's highest setting and if that's the case this tells me that your lawn is very much bulging up of thatch, also the photos certainly show this.
If you were to cut it back there's no point in lowering the reel mowers setting gradually, you'll just never get any green surface on it this way, rather bite the bullet and get a rotary mower that will have the ability to get down really low and do it in stages reducing the height setting over each pass of the whole lawn. Many rotary just won't get down low enough so that you can only see the base soil and thus have all your neighbours talking behind your back saying how this guys just killed off his lawn. Little do they really know as that's exactly the response I got and now I have all the folk commenting on how great the lawn looks.
Basically you need to scalp it all in one day. We are always trying to use the cylinder cut mower at it's lower end settings and never high.
I hope you've got a big trailer as the amount of clippings are going to be awesome.
After that I'd give it a dosing of Scotts Lawn Builder and water in well. This will reduce the work load next spring with you only having to spend a short time on re-scalping and getting straight into the scarification early in the morning and finishing it by lunchtime and getting the machine back to it's owner as most of them charge by the hour to try and avoid you doing multiple lawns, thus wearing the machine out quicker. Also this is to stop contractors from getting hold of them and making lots of money at a cheap hiring rate.
The area you've described is the area I was referring to as I could see the moss build up. Maybe you could remove the lawn from that area and reallocate the space to something else as the lawn will always be susceptible to disease in that damp area.
Cheers,
BB.
PS I see that you are surrounded by a whole lot of other house proud home owners, so you've got to carry on the tradition don't you ?
