Lawn Aeration
All Green Lawn Treatments provides a full lawn aeration service to give you a great looking lawn with healthier grass and reduced lawn compaction.
What is lawn aeration?
Lawn aeration is a process of making thousands of small air holes in your lawn’s surface. These holes allow your lawn to ‘breathe’, allowing air and nutrients to get to the grass roots and improving the health of your lawn. Aeration will also improve lawn drainage.
Many people ask how they will know if they need to aerate their lawn or how often they need to do it, so we’ve put together a bit of information to help you decide whether your lawn needs aerating.
Why do lawns need aerating?
Lawns need aerating when the soil below them becomes compacted, something that happens through use. Mowing, playing football or just walking on your lawn will cause the soil to get squashed down. Even a lawn that is not used often will still become compacted over time.
Compaction is worse in areas with a heavy clay soil such as Northamptonshire and much of Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire. Lawns with a heavy thatch, that is the loose layer between the soil and the green living grass shoots, also benefit from aeration.
How will I know if my lawn needs aerating?
As indicated above, if your lawn gets heavy use the chances are it will need aerating on a regular basis. Similarly if your soil feels very hard in the drier summer months, indicating a heavy clay soil, it should also be aerated. You can also look for other signs such as water puddling on the lawn after heavy rain, or thin or patchy grass.
An easy way to test for lawn compaction is to push a screwdriver or a garden fork into it. If the soil is compacted this will be extremely difficult to do. Of course as part of All Green’s free lawn analysis, we’ll double-check for compaction and explain exactly how the process will help get your lawn into better shape.
How do All Green carry out lawn aeration?
All Green uses a process called hollow-tine lawn aeration. In hollow-tine aeration, rather than just poking holes into the lawn, thousands of tiny plugs are taken from the lawn. At All Green we believe this is the most effective way to ease compaction, thin surface lawn thatch, and allow air, water and fertiliser to penetrate down into the roots of the grass.
Once we’ve carried out your free lawn analysis we will arrange a convenient time with you to carry out the process. For an average sized lawn the actual aeration should take between 1 and 2 hours. Once the process is complete the plugs that have been removed will be left on the surface and will decompose back down naturally over a few weeks.Or if you prefer we can put the plugs that have been removed into your green waste bin for the council to take away.
What time of year should aeration take place?
To get the biggest benefits from aerating your lawn we carry out the process in spring. However the treatment can be carried out at any time, and if your lawn is very compacted we’d recommend it is done as soon as weather conditions allow.