Lawn Aeration

Aeration can improve your lawn's health.

Aeration is a key strategy to keeping your lawn healthy. The soil beneath a lawn can become compacted or covered with thick thatch, reducing the ability of air, fertilizer or water to seep into the soil and reach the roots. Aeration, usually accomplished with a core aerator, punctures holes into the lawn by removing small plugs.

Timing

While the ideal timing for aeration varies depending on your climate and your type of grass, aerating early in the growing season allows grass to recover fully from any damage caused by core aeration. Wait to aerate until the ground has thawed, and avoid aerating during periods of extremely hot and dry weather. How often you should aerate depends on how often the lawn is subjected to foot traffic. In most cases, you should aerate one to two times per year.

Procedure

You can acquire a core aerator from many equipment rental agencies. To aerate your lawn, make multiple passes over the yard with a core aerator until you have punctured 20 to 40 holes per square foot. Wait until the soil is relatively dry to aerate the yard, as this will help the holes penetrate into the soil more deeply. In addition, damp soil can become plugged in the core aerator's tubes. For the aeration to be most effective, holes should be 2 to 3 inches deep and, at most, 4 inches apart.

Post-Aeration

Once you have passed across the lawn several times, use a piece of rough fencing to break the resulting cores of soil into smaller pieces. It may take a few days or a few weeks for the cores to completely break down. Particularly for a thatchy lawn, you can improve the lawn's overall health by letting the cores work back into the soil. If you're aerating before planting a new lawn, you can seed immediately following aeration. You don't need to top-dress the ground after aerating.

Benefits

Aeration can improve grass growth and result in a more vigorous, lush lawn. By making the soil less compacted, you can allow more water and nutrients to penetrate the soil and access the grass roots. As a result, roots grow more readily. In addition, the aeration reduces the amount of thatch build-up on the lawn's surface. An alternate type of aerator, which uses spikes instead of tubes, also helps to open up the soil, though it is less effective than core aerators with tubes.

References

• Iowa State University; Home Lawn Aeration; Richard Jauron; June 2005
• Colorado State University: Lawn Aeration
• Colorado State University; Lawn Care; T. Koski and V. Skinner; December 2003