It takes hard work and sometimes even years to maintain a beautiful lawn. The time, investment, and sweat it takes to get your lawn ready for Spring is exhausting. Fertilizing, mowing, and pruning your lawn may not be enough. Harsh winters can deteriorate and strip away the soil’s nutrients, cause thatching, and ruin your grass.
That’s why we encourage our clients to seek alternative ways, like lawn aeration, to revive their lawns from further damage. First, let us explain what that entails, and then allow us to do the heavy lifting throughout the process.
Lawn aeration, or core aeration, is a fantastic method to help your lawn breathe again. Lawn aeration equipment breaks down compacted soil, leaving small pockets for air, water, and fertilizer to spread into the root zone. Areas of your lawn with a lot of foot traffic or activity require more aeration to repair the areas that need more growth.
The best time of year to do lawn aeration is in Spring or Fall. We recommend that your grass is extra short before the lawn aeration process begins. Having about 1.5-2 inches of grass is the perfect length to have before starting. We recommend also that you have already over seeded your lawn. Over seeding allows new grass to grow in areas that might be damaged or weak through sowing.
The purpose of lawn aeration is twofold. On the one hand, it reduces the amount of compacted soil. Compacted isn’t always beneficial because it causes thatching or thatches. Thatch is a layer of organic plant matter including crowns, stolons, rhizomes, and roots. Basically, it is essentially dead grass that had roots growing on the surface instead of deep down in the soil. Because lawn aeration reduces thatching, the nutrients from the fertilizer can sink deeper into the ground. Racking can only remove some thatching; that’s why aeration is important to reduce it overall.
Not only does lawn aeration enables fertilizer to be better permeated, but it enables water and oxygen to spread too. The importance of water and air can make or break the vitality of your grass. The process of aeration will pull plugs from the ground that look like pegs. These pegs help oxygen inside the soil. These plugs are about two inches in depth. They’re pulled from the ground. Prior, the ground must be watered so that the soil is soft but not too muddy.
The root system in your grass is hard to reach. That’s why lawn aeration is the key for enabling re-growth, from root to tip. Overall, lawn aeration will help your lawn look brand, spanking new for the Spring. However, the process of reaching your root system isn’t so easy. It’s difficult because some of the equipment required is hefty and expensive. We recommend that you look to a professional like Elite Property Maintenance to do the heavy lifting while you can sit and relax.