You want your lawn to be thick, green, and beautiful. Fortunately, with a few simple maintenance steps, you can achieve and maintain the healthy lawn you’ve always wanted. Proper lawn care includes mowing, fertilizing, and watering, in addition to a simple technique that ensures nutrients reach through the grass and into the soil: lawn aeration.
Copper Ridge Outdoors is here to help you enjoy every bit of time you spend outside, whether that means hunting in the woods or sitting back and having a drink on your beautiful lawn. Take the next step toward beautiful green grass today, and order an aerator tool from Copper Ridge Outdoors! Then, come back and see what other high-quality outdoor supplies we have to offer. To learn more about lawn aeration, from the process itself to the tools you’ll need, keep reading!
What Is Aeration?
For those unfamiliar with lawn aeration, it refers to the process of creating holes or divots in the soil. Aeration helps make the soil more permeable and encourages the growth of thick, healthy, green grass.
Grass roots require air, water, and nutrients to thrive, and in some circumstances, your grass can easily acquire everything it needs. If the soil starts to compact, whether that compaction is caused by vehicles, small equipment, or the running feet of kids and pets, then it can prevent those important elements from reaching the point where they are needed most.
Thatch, a layer of decomposing organic matter that builds up between the soil and grass, can also affect the health of your lawn. Aeration is often paired with dethatching or implemented with a tool that can achieve both aeration and dethatching at once.
Why Should You Aerate Your Lawn?
Lawn aeration comes with a number of benefits. As we just touched upon, it penetrates the soil to allow air, water, and important nutrients to reach grass roots to encourage the growth of healthier grass. It also relieves soil compaction. If your grass is thin, stressed, or dying, then these are all symptoms that can be relieved by lawn aeration.
When Should You Aerate Your Lawn?
You should aerate your law right before or during your grasses’ peak growth period. Do not aerate a dormant or overly wet lawn. A dormant lawn won’t recover as well as an actively growing lawn, and an overly wet lawn can be hard to aerate and hard on your tools.
Keep in mind that attempting the process at the wrong time can stress the grass. If you time it correctly, and your lawn aeration steps coincides with your grasses’ active growth period, your lawn should recover quickly and fill in areas of exposed soil.
For home or property owners in more northern states, those cool-season grasses are often best aerated in early fall or early spring. For those in southern states, the best time to aerate your warm-season grasses would be late spring or early summer. These are generalizations — the correct timing will depend on what kind of grasses you are cultivating in your lawn
Copper Ridge Outdoors also recommends timing your lawn aeration for a day when the soil is moist from irrigation or rainfall from the day before. It will make the ground more pliable and permeable. If the ground is too wet, then we recommend waiting a few days for your lawn to reach a more optimal state.
How to Aerate Your Lawn
Lawn aeration is a similar process to mowing the lawn. You can hire landscaping professionals to handle it, but it’s also well within the ability of most property owners to handle the process themselves with the right tools, which we’ll cover shortly. With the aerator tool of your choice, you should move methodically across your lawn and make several passes in several different directions. You can pass over high-traffic areas – like playgrounds, dog runs, or parking spaces – several times to better address soil compaction.
Choose Your Aerator
You’ll need the proper tools if you want to aerate your lawn yourself, but keep in mind that you’ll have a few options to choose from. There are several types of aerator tools, from the most DIY-friendly aerator shoe attachments to the ATV equipment offered by Copper Ridge Outdoors. Each offers a slightly different kind of lawn aeration.
Spike Aerators
A spike aerator tool pokes a hole into the soil with a spike-like tine. Simple tools like lawn aerating shoes are often spike aerators. These spikes do penetrate the soil, but they can also make soil compaction worse.
Slicing Aerators
A slicing aerator tool uses rotating blades to slice through grass and thatch and cut into the soil. It leaves the soil in the ground, but it still creates pathways for nutrients to reach the grass roots without causing further compression.
Core or Plug Aerators
Core aerators are often the preferred aerator tool of landscaping professionals. These tools use a row of hollow tines to remove plugs of soil from the lawn. The plugs remain on the surface to break down over time and reintroduce beneficial matter to your lawn.
Lawn Aftercare
If you can, try to pair lawn aeration with other lawn care steps for best results. Overseed and fertilize directly after aerating or perform any necessary lawn repairs. Seeds and nutrients can find direct contact with the soil through the openings you created and put your lawn on the fast track for better, lusher growth
Order Your Aerator Tool From Copper Ridge Outdoors
Are you ready to take responsibility for the health and beauty of your lawn? Order your aerator tool for Copper Ridge Outdoors to get started! We help you make the most of your all-terrain vehicle with a three-point hitch system and a tow-behind plug aerator that can effectively penetrate large sections of grass in each pass. Explore our inventory for more versatile ATV implements, and keep an eye on our blog for more information on how to create the best possible lawn or landscape with our tools!