Lawn Aeration

What Is Aeration?

Aeration is is one of the single most important procedures you can carry out on grass. It prunes roots off, opens up oxygen pathways and removes small thatch plugs from a lawn. Aeration is also an essential process to help reduce moss levels.

Over time, as a lawn receives a lot of use and foot traffic, the soil becomes hard and compact, meaning the grass is affected by the poor environment below. When the soil becomes highly compact, the lawn can easily become a little waterlogged as moisture cannot pass through into the soil properly.

In order to consistently maintain a healthy lawn, aeration must be carried out annually.

Why is Lawn Aeration Essential and Beneficial?

• Reduces the compaction of the soil.
• Encourages healthy root growth.
• Increases root depth.
• Improves drainage.
• Helps lawns become more drought resistant.
• Reduces water runoff.
• Helps to break down thatch.
• Allows water, air and nutrients to have direct access to the root system.
• Makes it easier to over-seed your lawn.
• Improves gas exchanges between the soil and atmosphere.
• Stimulates soil microbes.

When done correctly, aeration can be one of the most beneficial processes for a lawn. This is completed towards the end of the year using a professional heavy machine that pushes tine bars into the soil allowing air and nutrients into the soil profile.

What Type of Aeration is Required?

The most important factor to consider is whether the type of aeration being offered is the correct type for your lawn, to ensure that it is beneficial. For example, if you have a clay soil-based lawn, then hollow-tine aeration would not provide any benefits, where as solid-tine aeration would.

If hollow-tine cores are left on the surface of a clay soil-based lawn, then more problems may occur which may need to be addressed. The cores may cause more thatch and an uneven level in the lawn surface.

Although hollow-tine aeration is very effective, the vast majority of lawns in the UK only require solid-tine aeration. One of the advantages of solid-tine aeration is that no cores are left on the surface of the lawn, therefore there is no mess to clear afterwards.