Aerating your lawn is an important part of keeping it healthy and lush. Many times, some of the problems you may blame on insects, fungus, under watering, or fertilizer problems are, in fact, actually due to the fact that you are not aerating correctly or as frequently as you should.
Aerating your lawn will help to prevent soil compaction, which happens when the top four inches of soil compact and prevent nutrients,
oxygen, and water from circulating around the grass properly. Aerating loosens the soil by removing cores of it and allowing room for the nutrients and air to circulate in the soil properly. The problem in home lawns is usually more prevalent in high traffic areas where people and pets might help the soil to compact more quickly than in other less disturbed parts of the lawn.
There is a simple test you can perform to
figure out if you lawn is in need of aeration. Take a screwdriver out to your lawn when the soil is moderately moist. Attempt to probe the screwdriver into the soil. If it is very difficult to do, then you likely need to aerate right away. On the other hand, if there is just a little resistance, then there is no compaction problem and you do not need to aerate.
Getting your home lawn aerated, though not always a common
practice, is not very expensive. In fact, the simplest and cheapest way to do it is to use a spading fork. Push the tines into the soil as far as you can then rock them back and forth. This is not the best way to aerate, but for lack of another way the tines will create space for the circulation and will loosen the soil. Because of the work involved, it is really only a method that works for small areas of lawn.
Another
small lawn solution for aeration is to spend a few dollars and purchase a sod-coring tool. The sod-coring tool actually removes cores of soil and deposits them on the lawn. The plugs that are left behind are as helpful to your lawn as the holes themselves. The plugs bring microorganisms up from below that can help decompose the thatch that may have developed in your grass.
What, though, if you have a larger yard? In the
case of a large yard, the two manual methods would be just too labor intensive. The answer is a power-driven core aerator. You can rent one at your local home or garden store. The machine takes hollow tubes and drives them into the lawn. Cores of soil are removed and left over the lawn. Some will, instead, have spoon shaped tines that perform the same task essentially. Leave the plugs on the lawn, but you can rake them in if you
don't like the way they look laying on the grass.
No matter which method you use for aeration, there is a technique to it. First, go over the entire lawn in one direction, like if you were mowing. Then, go over another direction, perpendicular to what you had just done. Using this method to go over the entire lawn twice will give you the best results when aerating.
If you have a bare area in your yard or a
part where the grass is just sparse, then you may want to combine seeding and aerating to get the good lawn results you want. If you choose to combine aerating with seeding, then you should go over the lawn six or ten times. There should be a lot of holes in the area you are seeding. Then, give the holes about a month so they can begin to heal so that you don't get speckled looking grass. Then, simply put out your seed, keep it
watered, and you are on your way to a healthy and new looking lawn.
Aeration is an important, and often overlooked, part of lawn care. Golf courses and sports field maintenance teams do it all the time, but for some reason it gets neglected by homeowners. The process of aerating your lawn is not expensive, but can help you to a healthy lawn and help you avoid many problems you likely blamed on other things in the past.
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