When Should I Aerate My Lawn?
Have you been wondering, “When should I aerate my lawn?” Get the answers you need to this and other questions about lawn aeration from the Jonathan Green team.
Jonathan Green is a leading supplier of cool season grass seed, soil enhancers, fertilizer, and organic lawn and garden products to professional customers, such as sod growers and independent retailers, including garden centers and hardware stores, throughout the United States.
FAQs About Lawn Aeration
What is Aeration?
Aeration is the practice of removing soil plugs or slices of turf to create openings in the surface of the lawn. This helps water, air, and nutrients better penetrate the soil and helps your lawn breathe. It also helps alleviate soil compaction, creates better air flow around the roots of the grass plants, and encourages the roots to grow more deeply.
Why Should I Aerate My Lawn?
Although aerating a healthy lawn can help keep turf lush and green, the lawn will reap the most benefits from aeration if it exhibits any of the following conditions:
- Hard or compacted soil. Compacted soil can prevent air, water, and fertilizer from reaching your lawn’s root system, causing dead spots, patches and/or thinning. Aeration will decrease soil density and provide grass with better access to water, nutrients, and air.
- Excessive thatch. Too much thatch can increase the turf’s susceptibility to lawn diseases and fungus; reduce its tolerance to cold, drought, and heat stress; and rob the soil of its ability to absorb water, oxygen, and nutrients efficiently. Aeration reduces thatch buildup.
When Should I Aerate My Lawn?
You can aerate your lawn at any time of the year, but the best time to do it is in the fall for cool-season grasses like Black Beauty® Original Grass Seed, or in the spring/early summer for warm-season grasses, such as Bermudagrass.
The lawn should also be moist, so be sure to wait until after a good rainfall or give the lawn about a half inch of water before trying to aerate it. If you are irrigating with a sprinkler attached to a standard garden hose, this usually means 45 minutes per area. If you have an inground sprinkler system, water for at least 30 minutes per zone. Push a screw driver into the ground. If you can push it up to the handle, you are ready to begin aerating
How Should I Aerate My Lawn?
If your soil is very compacted, use Jonathan Green Love Your Soil® to loosen and aerate the lawn organically. Love Your Soil® will also feed soil microbes, make the soil more alive and porous, enhance root development, and provide about 25% more soil-loosening power than MAG-I-CAL® Plus.
Aeration can also be done mechanically with a core aerator, a gas-powered machine that will remove small plugs of soil from the ground. To reduce costs, consider renting the core aerator machine from a local home improvement center or equipment rental center and share it with a neighbor or two.
Mentioned Products
For more tips on when you should aerate your lawn and how to do it, visit Jonathan Green online or stop by your nearest independent home and garden retailer for professional advice. Your lawn will thank you for it.