
Everything You Need to Know About Lawn Aeration
Basic lawn care procedures such as appropriate mowing, fertilisation, and watering should be used to produce and maintain a beautiful lawn. It’s also crucial to make sure nutrients get to the soil beneath your lawn. Because it allows air and water to permeate built-up grass or lawn thatch, aeration is essential for maintaining a healthy lawn.
With this brief approach to aeration, you can get rid of thatch and make room for a lovely lawn. For the most pleasing results, you’ll discover why, how, and when to aerate your lawn.
What is Lawn Aeration?
Making small holes in the soil to allow water, air, and nutrients to reach the roots is known as aeration. The roots will grow deeper, as a result, resulting in a healthier, more vibrant lawn.
Aeration’s primary purpose is to alleviate soil compaction. An excessive quantity of solid particles in a given volume of space are found in compacted soils.
- Preventing the proper flow of air.
- Water.
- The flow of nutrients inside the soil.
Excess lawn thatch and heavy organic matter buried beneath the grass surface could be depriving the roots of these essential nutrients.
Is It Necessary to Aerate Your Lawn?
One of the most often asked topics from homeowners is how to tell if their grass needs to be aerated. If your lawn has any of the following characteristics, it’s a suitable candidate for aeration:
- It gets a lot of use, such as as a local playground or a racetrack. Soil compaction is exacerbated by children and pets running about the yard.
- It was built as part of a freshly constructed house. Newly created lawns frequently have their topsoil scrapped or buried, and the grass growing on the subsurface has been compressed by construction traffic.
- It dries quickly and has a spongy texture. This could indicate that your grass has a lot of thatch. Take a shovel and cut a four-inch-deep slit in the turf. Aeration is recommended if the thatch layer is more than one-half inch thick.
- Sod was used to establish the site, and soil layering was seen. Soil layering is when a finer-textured soil, such as that found in imported sod, is laid over the existing coarser soil. Because water is retained in the finer-textured soil, this stacking obstructs drainage. As a result, the soil becomes compacted, and root development suffers. Aerating the soil breaks up the layers, allowing water to move more freely through the soil and reach the roots.
When Should You Aerate Your Lawn?
During the growing season, when the grass can fill and heal up any open areas left by removing soil plugs, aeration is most effective. Aerate cool-season grass lawns in the early spring or fall and warm-season grass lawns in the late spring, if practicable. There are various aeration tools.
Aerating Equipment: Spike Aerator vs. Plug Aerator
A spike aerator and a plug aerator are the two most common aerating tools. With a spike aerator, you use a firm tine or fork to puncture holes into the earth. A plug aerator is a lawn aerator that removes a core or plug of grass and soil. Use an aerating tool or equipment that removes dirt plugs for the most significant results. Poking holes in the ground are ineffective and might promote more compaction in the areas surrounding the holes.
How should you Aerate your lawn?
If you’re determined that your grass needs aeration, here are some lawn care suggestions:
- Before you begin, make sure the soil is adequately moist. Nothing is more aggravating than trying to aerate dry soil. It’s preferable to aerate your grass the day after a rainstorm or water it the day before.
- Because most aeration devices only reach a tiny part of the soil surface per pass, they make several passes over the most compacted areas. To save resources and energy, leave untouched areas alone.
- To give your lawn a uniform, clean appearance, allow the dug soil plugs to dry before breaking them up. To break them up, run a lawnmower over them or pound them with the back of a rake.
- A widespread myth regarding aeration is that it will remove the herbicide “barrier” if you keep on applying pre-emergent herbicide to your lawn in the spring. This isn’t the case; studies show that aeration has little effect on crabgrass control or weed control.
- Routine lawn care methods such as fertiliser, mowing, and watering should be continued after aeration.
Conclusion
Lawn Aeration is an important part of creating a beautiful lawn, yet most people are unaware of it or don’t understand how it works. Make aerate a part of your lawn care routine if your grass is a candidate. Your lawn will appreciate you allowing it to breathe once more.