Aerating Your Lawn: Is It Really Necessary?
Aerating Your Lawn: Is It Really Necessary?
Lawn maintenance is important when it comes to making sure that your yard remains healthy. It will also help improve the health of the plants in it as well, along with increasing overall curb appeal. When it comes to maintaining lawns, many homeowners consider aeration. Aeration proves to be very beneficial, especially when it comes to the compaction of soil and improving the growth of grass.
What Is Lawn Aeration?
Aeration is a method of lawn maintenance that crates holes or openings on the turf of your lawn in order to help allow water and air to go down and penetrate through the roots of your grass. The method is usually achieved by using a motorized machine. There are also various manual tools available that can work well on small lawns or yards. There are also various companies that offer lawn aeration as well.
Why Aerating Your Lawn Is Important
The grass in your lawn needs to be able to breathe. When you step on your lawn, mow it, and various other tasks and activities, it starts to become compacted. You would need aeration in order to be able to bring back your lawn into its best shape. This is especially true if many people constantly step on your lawn, or if you have grass that is planted on soil that has a lot of clay content.
The roots of your grass need the right amount of air and water to be able to grow into strong and thick grass. Compacted soil will hinder the overall flow of these essential nutrients that will help your grass grow healthy, and this will also affect how your lawn looks like. Deprived soil will end up losing their healthy color as well, and may even die out completely. Aeration can help your grass have access to these essential nutrients to be able to grow back into great condition.
When You Should Aerate Your Lawn
Remember that lawn aeration won’t harm your lawn, but it will make it look much more attractive instead. Ideally, you should be aerating your lawn once a year. If your lawn is based on clay soil, then you should be doing it at least twice a year.
Make sure that you aerate your lawn before growing season. Also, you shouldn’t be aerating your lawn during the spring. However, if you notice that you soil seems to be compacted, and that your grass doesn’t seem to be growing, then you may have to aerate your lawn during this season. Nonetheless, unless you absolutely need to, homeowners aren’t encouraged to aerate during the spring. This is because the holes that are made during aeration will encourage the growth of weeds.
You may also aerate your lawn during late spring, because weeds will already have already grown out. But do this only if you really need to. When it comes to the best time of the year to aerate, it will be during the fall. This is because weed growth is minimal because of the cold weather. This will also be the time when your grass is beginning to grow, so lawn aeration will be perfect when it comes to letting the grass absorb all the nutrients that will be available once aeration occurs.