All About Lawn Aerators

Room to grow

In addition to regular mowing, watering, and weeding, gardeners use various techniques of lawn aeration to produce the healthy, even grass that homeowners so prize.  Every lawn can experience greater health and vitality as a result of aeration, even otherwise healthy lawns.  While the forms of home lawn aerators can vary, the end product remains the same:  healthy soil that produces lush grass.

Constant wear and tear on the lawn from foot traffic, children at play, or other stressors produces impaction in the underlying soil.  Even routine mowing can give rise to soil impaction, reducing the ability of grass seedlings to grow.  Lawn aerators can alleviate this inevitable over packing of the soil by breaking it up.

Tools of the trade

Several methods and sets of corresponding tools exist for the residential gardener.

A spading fork, such as a heavy-duty broadfork, jabbed several inches into the soil and gently rocked back and forth breaks up impacted dirt.  Although time-consuming and labor-intensive, this method can work for small yards or in hard-to-access patches where a larger machine would be cumbersome.

Lawn-aerating spikes attached to shoes are another procedure, and quite literally requires running over the problem.  The tiny holes they leave behind loosen the bound up dirt.  These spikes give gardeners a chance to do double duty, aerating the lawn as they walk behind the mower.  The spikes on the shoes may not penetrate deeply enough into the soil for a thorough aeration, although the cumulative result of prolonged wear might be advantageous.

Use a core lawn aerator or power aerator for greater ease and efficiency. Although manual methods offer some alleviation of soil compaction, a fully aerated lawn has at least ten half-inch diameter holes made by the aerator per square foot. Many businesses offer these aerator machines for rental.  Most of these machines run on gasoline and operate in a fairly simple manner:  pull the choke, give the starter rope a pull, and once the engine starts running, release the choke.  Shaped much like a lawnmower, these push machines feature a set of hollow, piston-like coring devices that dig into the earth and bring up cylindrical chunks of soil.

After aeration

The cores of soil left behind naturally decompose after a few weeks, although most people prefer to rake them up for aesthetic reasons.  The holes left behind allow water, air, and nutrients to penetrate the grass's root zone.  Although potentially unsightly in the short term, complete and effective aeration greatly improves the health of the soil.  After aerating, fertilize, water the lawn and distribute sifted compost or top dressing by spreading it evenly over the lawn (with a spreader, if possible).

Depending on the type of yard, aeration should be repeated periodically, approximately once every year.  High traffic yards may require more frequent service, as often as three times per year.  If the lawn has been neglected for more than a few years, several aerations in rapid succession, followed by more routine maintenance could reverse the depletion of the soil.
 

The best time of year to aerate is when grass is actively growing, which means fall for cool-season grass and spring for warm-season grass.

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