One of the keys to having a healthy and lush lawn is to aerate it when needed. Sometimes what you may think are insect, under watering or fertilizer problems, are surely happening naturally because you are not aerating the soil as often as you should.
Soil compaction is an enemy of a good healthy lawn, and it happens when the top 4 in. Or so of topsoil become compacted to the point where nutrients, oxygen, and water are prevented from circulating nearby the grass roots properly. When you aerate the soil, you essentially are loosening it up to allow room for nutrients and air to circulate down into the soil. Soil compaction often becomes a question in high-traffic areas where people and pets seem to frequent, rather than less traveled areas of the lawn.
A very cheap and uncostly way to find out if your soil is to compacted and therefore in need of aeration, is to take a uncomplicated screwdriver out to your lawn after it has been watered and try to push the screwdriver down into the soil. If the screwdriver goes into the soil with roughly no resistance at all, then there is no compaction question that you need to be implicated about. But on the other hand, if you find it's difficult to get the screwdriver into the soil, then you'll need to aerate your soil as swiftly as possible.
The surely good news about lawn aeration is that for most yards it's a very uncostly thing to do. In fact, if your yard is small to medium sized, and especially if the compaction is slight to just a small section of the yard, you can even use something as uncomplicated as a spading fork to aerate your soil in those areas. All you have to do is push the tines of the fork into the soil as far as you can and then rock them back and forth. Do this throughout the area that has the compaction problem.
Another very uncostly clarification is to purchase a sod coring tool that surely removes small cores of soil and deposits them on the lawn. These plugs that are left behind include microorganisms from deep in the ground that can even help decompose the thatch that may have advanced in your lawn. So using a coring tool can be useful in a estimate of ways for your yard.
If you have a larger yard, the two methods mentioned above may naturally require too much labor to perform. So the best clarification in this case would be a power driven core aerater that can be rented ordinarily at a tool rental or local organery store. This engine essentially does exactly what a sod coring tool does, except it automates the process. It also will leave the core plugs on your lawn, which as was mentioned can be very useful in themselves, or you can also rake them up and take off them if you wish.
When aerating your lawn, its good too go in one direction first, and then go over the whole lawn in a dissimilar direction, perpendicular to what you had just done. If you use this recipe to go over the whole lawn at least twice you should get great results from your aerating.
If there are spots in your yard where the grass is sparse, you can also combine seeding and aerating at the same time. In this case, you'll need to go over the lawn possibly six or seven times to make fullness of holes for the seed. But don't apply the seed right away. Wait for about a month or so to let the yard heal after the aeration first.
Lawn aeration is a very important, but often overlooked part of good lawn care. But if you ensue the guidelines given above you should be able to have a beautiful, healthy, green lawn in no time.
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