Living the dream of home ownership, back yard barbecues, playing with your kids in the yard and sitting outside on your nice grass. Sounds awesome right? What if your grass is not so green and needs to be rescued? Several factors can cause your lawn to loose in color and become infested with weeds. There is a process that can help promote the soil condition and improve the health of your lawn. Lawn Aeration benefits your yard in many ways and is easy to do,
Benefits
The process of core aeration is to remove small plugs of soils and grass through out your lawn allowing more water and oxygen to mix below the soil into the roots of your grass. The benefits of this process include:
- Reduced soil compaction from heavy foot traffic. Usually best for playgrounds or sport fields.
- Breaks up heavy layers of thatch. Thatch can keep water from draining into the soil, as well as allowing shallow rooted weeds to grow into the layer of thatch.
- Allows for better distribution of fertilizer and grass seeds if needed. Do not fertilizer lawn before core aeration. Aerating will limit the amount of coverage of the fertilizer throughout the lawn. This can lead to striping or inconsistent lawn color.
- Improves the soil quality for lawns with clay soils. Clay soil is notorious for having poor drainage, and usually needs additional soil amendments. Core aeration allows the amendments to mix with the clay more efficiently.
Types Aerators
Basically the process of aerating is putting holes into the lawn, but the most efficient method is core plug aerating. You can find tools for lawn aeration at hardware stores or lawn and garden centers.
- Manual tine press is used for smaller lawns and smaller areas of need to be aerated. It is similar to digging with a shovel, just place into the ground and step on it.
- Core Plug Aerator is a motor driven machine that can remove plugs of sod over a large area in a minimal amount of time. These heavy duty aerators work best to consistently removes plugs. These can be expensive to purchase, but can be rented for the day or per project duration. It may be more cost effective to have a lawn maintenance company handle the project for you because of the weight and handling of this machine.
The goal is to have a green and lush lawn, but core aeration is 1 step for maintaining a lawn. To succeed in lawn longevity and health you need to follow a lawn maintenance schedule of core aerating, but also, fertilizing, seeding and lawn mowing during the growing season.
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My brother has his lawn done and I can’t tell you how lush and green it is just a week or so later. I figured since my lawn is smaller, I could do manual aeration but it ended up being more of a pain than I thought. It is time consuming and I ended up pulling my back. I thought I would be saving money doing it this way but now I know to just hire someone to help me do it!