Additional Information On Aeration
Before aerating, please keep the following in mind:
- Aeration helps to control thatch.
- It is extremely difficult to core aerate heavy clay soils.
- Aeration is not recommended for soils that have stones, rocks or tree roots just below the soil surface.
- Be sure to mark sprinkler heads, shallow lines from sprinkler, underground utilities, cable, and septic lines before aerating so they will not be damagedSoil cores are best left on the lawn surface they typically work back into the grass in 2-4 weeks.
- Lawns may be fertilized and seeded immediately following aeration with or without further soil topdressing.
- Lawns can be aerated once a year, especially under heavy use conditions.
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How Much Should Lawn Aeration Cost
The exact cost of your lawn aeration will depend upon the size of your lawn. Professional lawn care companies will usually charge a fixed price per thousand square feet, so the bigger your lawn is, the more your lawn aeration will cost.
Most lawn care companies will charge in the vicinity of $15-$17 per square thousand feet to aerate your lawn. So, if your lawn is ten thousand square feet, you could be looking at anywhere between $150 and $170 to have your lawn aerated.
If you wish the lawn care company to perform other lawn maintenance tasks such as seeding or fertilizing after they have performed the aeration, you can expect this cost to increase accordingly.
As lawn aeration is a task that is performed, at most, once per year, this initial outlay averages out to be a cost of just a little more than $10 a month. For a task that improves the health and vitality of your lawn, it seems a small price to pay!
More Durable And Resistant To Foot Traffic
If you have a lawn, most likely you want to use your lawn. If you have kids or entertain often, your lawn might take a bit of a beating. Thats why aerating your lawn is so vital. When your lawn receives all the air, water, and nutrients it needs, it grows strong and is more durable. Just like when you eat all your veggies, youre more likely to ward off colds and other illnesses.
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How To Aerate A Lawn
The process or aerating a lawn is simple. There are two tools you can use which will help you. Choose from a Plug Aerator or a Spike Aerator. The Plug Aerator, as expected, will remove a plug of soil from your lawn leaving a hole. A Spike Aerator will simply spike holes into the existing soil. You can easily rent either of these machines from your local garden store or home improvement centre.
Before you begin firstly use your lawn mower to crop the grass very short, it is also important to ensure the soil is thoroughly moist. Trying to aerate dry soil could cause further problems and compaction. Go over each area more than once, and in different directions for thorough coverage. If you chose to use a Plug Aerator remove and dry out the plugs of soil then spread them evenly over the lawn once the process is complete.
Make sure that you aerate to the right depth simply aerating a compacted layer wont help, you must go deeper than this to ensure the soil is penetrated properly, you are trying to make deep holes with uncompacted walls.
After you have finished aerating your lawn, you should cover it with new grass seed and then take particular care to water, fertilise and mow back the grass regularly. Repeat this process at least once a year, if not more, dependant on your garden usage and you will reap the benefits of having a strong and healthy looking lawn.
What Does Aerating A Lawn Do
A lawn needs many things to keep it at its healthiest. Your lawn needs proper sun, moisture, nutrients, and room to breathe, thrive and grow. Your lawn is always exposed to fresh air and sun, so how can you let it breathe? Through lawn aeration.
Lets learn more about this common landscaping practice including what it is, how it helps your lawn, and some specifics about aerating in Colorado. There are so many things you can do for a healthier lawn, but aeration is among the most important.
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How Often Should I Aerate My Lawn
Different soil types require more frequent aeration. Clay soil compacts easily and should be aerated at least once a year. You can aerate a sandy lawn once a year, or once every two years. In harsher climates, aerating twice a year will encourage turf growth and health.
In areas where there is a high amount of foot traffic, pets or even cars on the lawn, compaction is a common problem. Regular aerating will be important to ensure the ground doesnt become too hard and help the soil to breathe and the grass to spread.
What Is The Purpose Of Lawn Aeration
Lawn aeration serves primarily to break up and remove thatch. Thatch is the blanket of organic material that settles on grass over time, where it continues to accumulate when the soil is no longer able to decompose it.
When it is up to 3-4 mm thick, thatch works like mulch, which reduces the evaporation of moisture from the ground: this is good for your lawn, especially in summer. Beyond that thickness, it becomes an insidious barrier to the health and beauty of the grass, by:
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preventing penetration of light, oxygen and water
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forcing grass to grow taller in search of light
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making irrigation, fertilisation and reseeding less efficient.
In practice, with less light, water and nutrients available, lawns become more vulnerable to disease and less resistant to summer drought and the rigours of winter.
So what does aerating the garden involve? Lawn aeration eliminates thatch , thereby restoring oxygen to the grass roots, allowing the soil to absorb water and nutrients and enabling grass seedlings to effectively photosynthesise. More vigorous aerationverticutting and soil scarificationinvolves using a special bladed machine to make slits several millimetres or centimetres deep into the soil. This thins out the grass, facilitating the circulation of oxygen, water and nutrients.
Aerating your lawn doesnt just remove thatch. It also eliminates moss, which suffocates grass, especially in shaded areas, wherever there is stagnant moisture and free space.
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When Lawns Need Aeration
It may not seem your lawn could get compacted, but it happens easier than you may think. Vehicles or small equipment driven on lawns are more obvious offenders, but even outdoor entertaining or yard play by kids and pets can leave all or part of your lawn compacted. If you live where heavy clay soil is the norm, annual aeration is probably needed to keep your lawn from becoming thin and weak.
Dethatching and aerating are two different tasks, but they often go hand in hand. Thatch is the layer of decomposing organic matter that forms right at the lawn surface, between soil and grass. When thatch gets more than 1/2 inch thick, it works like compaction to prevent the flow of air, water and nutrients grasses need. Aggressive spreading grasses, such as Kentucky bluegrassin northern lawns and Bermudagrass down south, form more thatch than many other grass types. Aeration helps penetrate and reduce thatch buildup or prep it for removal through dethatching.
If your grass often looks stressed and your soil is hard to the touch or rainwater puddles up where it used to be absorbed, you may have compaction problems. Confirm your suspicions with a simple “screwdriver test.” Take a regular screwdriver and stick it into your lawn’s soil by hand. It should slide in fairly easily. If you meet resistance, your soil is compacted, and aeration can help.
What Do You Do After You Aerate Your Lawn
To fully enjoy lawn aeration benefits, you need to do the following after aerating your lawn.
- Fertilizer Application: Apply fertilizer to the soil immediately after aeration. It fills your soil with nutrients to feed the roots of your lawn grass.
- Ignore the Holes: The gaping holes left behind by aerating the lawn may irk you at first, but best to leave them alone. The holes will be filled with new roots within a few weeks.
- Lawn Watering: The lawn may become dry after aeration. Water your lawn heavily after aerating to encourage deeper grass root growth. Heavy watering helps after aeration improves the growth of your lawn grass.
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Is Dethatching Better Than Aerating
They both serve to help key nutrients like fertilizer, water or oxygen reach your lawn’s root zone so that your grass can continue to grow and thrive. However, aeration results in the breakdown of compacted soil whereas dethatching removes layers of thatch, or dead grass and other debris, from the top of the soil.
Signs That Indicate You Need To Aerate Your Lawn
Thatch is comprised of shoots, stems, and roots. This built-up plant material, also referred to as organic debris, is beneficial to the overall health of the lawn, but too much of it can deter healthy lawn growth. A half inch or more of lawn thatch is considered too thick and should be removed since it can also promote insect manifestation and diseases. Furthermore, excess thatch can prevent you from mowing your grass properly because its spongy consistency causes the lawn mower wheels to sink down and scalp your lawn.
Overall, if your lawn does not appear to be growing as well as it should despite seemingly proper care, such as adequate watering, lawn aeration might be the missing key element.
Here are some other indicators that you should aerate.
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When To Aerate A Lawn
Knowing when you should aerate your lawn is vital. Different weather can affect your soil in different ways and therefore choosing the right time to aerate your lawn is important in order to achieve optimum results. So when should you aerate your lawn in the UK? The best time is during the growing season, either in early or late spring or autumn, here the grass has the chance to heal and will be able to naturally fill into any patchy areas which may occur after you remove the soil plugs. Very hot weather can make aeration difficult due to dry soil, and similarly in the colder months, hard, frozen soil becomes impossible to penetrate effectively.
How Does Lawn Aeration Work
Lawns can be aerated either manually or with specialized lawn aeration equipment.
Lawn aerators remove narrow, 2-3 long cylinders of compacted soil from your grass at regular intervals. These cored areas create a grid of smallopen windows around the base of your lawn grasses, near their roots. These small openings let in air, water, and fertilizer so they quickly reach the grasses root system, right where theyre needed.
The cores are left on the lawn surface and dissolve over time , providing a quick top-dressing for your lawn.
Because these cores of soil are small and calibrated to your lawns growth habit, your lawn wont suffer any damage by aeration. Most lawns are made up of turf grasses that develop dense, fibrous root systems, and their root systems benefit from being periodically opened up.
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Aeration Enhances Grass Seed Germination
If your lawn is looking a little worn out or thin, you may want to overseed to fill in any sparse or winter-damaged patches while youre fertilizing. Compacted soil can make it impossible for grass seeds to get a foothold in the soil and grow. The grid of tiny soil openings that a lawn aerator creates is ideal for seed germination, and the new grass seeds will fill in bare spots and make your lawn even and lush.
If Your Lawn Has Drainage Problems
If you notice standing water in your yard or water that is not properly draining, your soil could be compacted so much that the water isnt moving along properly. If the water runs off of your lawn quickly when you water it instead of being absorbed, you could have a drainage issue. Aerating your lawn will enable water to penetrate the surface easier and eliminate or reduce these problems.
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Can I Mow And Aerate At The Same Time
Mow the lawn before you aerate it. Don’t mow the lawn for at least a week after aerating it. Make sure you know where all your sprinklers and pop-ups are otherwise you might damage them. It’s a good idea to water the lawn before aerating it because aeration is most effective when the soil is slightly moist.
Aerate In The Spring And Fall
Spring and fall are the best times of year to take advantage of aeration. The additional moisture of spring is beneficial to root growth, and aeration allows your lawn system to take full advantage of the increased moisture. For most grass varieties, the majority of growth takes place in the fall, and the extra space of aeration encourages your root system to take full advantage of the growing season.
A strong root system acts like a carpet beneath your lawn and creates a network that makes it impossible for weeds to encroach upon. A strong root system can even help reduce bug infestations as its more difficult for insects to build nests in thriving root systems. Healthy roots are also more able to absorb water and nutrients, which make your yard healthier and reduce drainage problems.
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Aeration: Why How & When To Aerate Your Lawn
In order to achieve and maintain a beautiful lawn, you should employ basic lawn care practices such as properly mowing, fertilizing and watering. It is also important to ensure that nutrients can reach the soil beneath your grass. Aeration can be an extremely vital element to a healthy lawn because it allows air and water to penetrate built-up grass or lawn thatch.
Get rid of thatch and make way for a beautiful lawn with this quick guide to aeration. Youll learn why, how and when to aerate your lawn for the best results.
Why Do You Need To Aerate Your Lawn
Although there are still many things to be learned about lawn aeration, theres one thing most experts agree on and that is that opening up the turfs surface is beneficial for it. Air and water are essential for the soil ecosystem and the soil microorganisms in it which help naturally break down thatch thus improving the lawn.
Good drainage conditions and adequate topsoil air intake are very important for the proper growth of grassroots as they help them breathe and grow. By aerating the soil, youre permitting air to enter into the soil, which leads to gaseous exchange. Meaning that the grassroots suck in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide.
Having too much carbon dioxide in the soil is not good as it can limit or completely prohibit its water and nutrients intake.
However, by thoroughly aerating an area where browning has occurred, you can restore to roots ability to intake moisture again. And if done right your grass colour will return to its regular green in just around a week.
On the other hand, if the lawn is not aerated during the cold rainy seasons such as autumn and winter completely different problems can occur. For example, your soil might experience surface sealing because of the compacting effect of walking around and using garden maintenance machines that are on the heavier side.
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How Often Should You Do It
A good practice is once a year in the fall if you have cool-weather grass like fescue that grows vertically. After a long and hot summer your lawn can likely use some TLC, and the warm days and cool nights of fall provide a perfect environment for rehabilitation.
After aeration you typically seed and add fertilizer and its important to keep the ground moist for the next 2-3 weeks . This will give the grass time to grow before it goes into dormancy in the winter. By the time the summer heat comes youll have more established grass that is better able to withstand heavy heat.
For those with warm-season grasses like Bermuda, the reverse would hold where you would aerate in the spring once the soil has thawed.
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How to aerate your lawn?
The process of aerating your lawn is broadly broken into four phases: preparation aeration fertilisation and topdressing. To aerate your lawn, follow these steps:
1. Dethatching
Dethatching is the process of removing the thick layer of decaying plant material from your lawn so that air, water, nutrients, and fertiliser can reach the soil better, plus your lawn can drain more effectively.
You will generally be able to tell if your lawn needs dethatching if there is a spongey feeling when you walk on it.
Dethatching prior to aeration will make it easier to aerate, whilst also making the aeration more effective.
For information on how to dethatch, watch this videoand/orread this article.
2. Mowing
If dethatching is not required, we still recommend that you mow your lawn quite short prior to aeration.
3. Watering
Be sure to water your lawn well a couple of days before aeration.
However, avoid aerating immediately after an extended period of rainfall. If the soil is too wet the soil will stick to the inside of the tines instead of falling easily back into the lawn.
4. Aeration
Aim for a spacing between the holes of around 10cm in order to achieve the appropriate density of aeration. You may need to go over the area twice in a different direction each time.
5. Fertilising
5. Top Dressing
Extra tips to improve your soil?
Test your pH
Lime
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