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Aerating your lawn ----- Aeration and Your Lawns Health
By Jack Greenwood

In simple terms, aeration is the process of exposing your grass roots to air circulation.
Air is crucial to health root growth that will in turn make your lawn healthy and green.

Aeration provides air to the roots and improves water penetration.
More air and water means healthy roots, which translate to a green and beautiful lawn.
Aerating also prevent soil compaction which happen frequently in areas with high human traffic.

Here is a simple test that you can do to figure out if your lawn need aeration.
Find a slender object with a sharp end such as a screwdriver and probe the sharp end into your lawn where the soil is moderately moist.
If you have difficulty doing so, it means aeration is required.


Photo / pic / image of a manual and petrol powered aerator.
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One way to aerate your lawn is to use a garden fork.
Push the tines into the soil as far as you can and rock them back and forth.
This will create space in the soil for air circulation.
This method is suitable for a small lawn or a small area in a large lawn.

A slightly better solution is to spend some money and purchase a sod-coring tool.
This will removes cores of soil and deposits them on the lawn.
These cores of soil will bring microorganism to the surface and help decompose any thatch that may have developed in your lawn.
This method is also suitable for small size lawn only.

For a large lawn, you will need to rent a petrol-powered core aerator, as the previous two methods are too labor-intensive.
The core aerator will pull out small cores of grass and soil and left them over your lawn.
You can leave the small cores of grass and soil your lawn or rake them in if you don’t like the way they look laying on the grass.

For best result, go over the entire lawn in one direction first.
Then go over in another direction that is perpendicular to what you have just done.
Repeat the same action in the two directions again.

If you have bare area in your lawn, you can consider combining aerating and seeding.
Simply aerate the bare area about eight times and leave the soil and holes alone for about a month.
Then sow your seeds and water regularly.
You should be able to see some results in a couple of month’s time.

Aeration is an important part of lawn care that should not be overlooked.
The process of aerating your lawn is relatively inexpensive but require some time and effort on your part.
Regular aeration will help you achieve a green and healthy lawn that you can be proud of for many years to come.

Jack Greenwood is the webmaster of http://www.GreenLawnCareTips.com/ which provide information on lawn care and maintenance.