Aerating Your Lawn - Why, When and How

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. Today I want to talk to you about aerating your grass. Why you should do it, when you should do it, and how you should do it. Now, why you should do it. First, grass is a monoculture. It's not a natural thing that occurs in nature, and so if you go to a meadow in the mountains, you're not going to see one single type of grass. And so to keep our lawn healthy, so that that one culture can grow well, you have to do some things that nature does not do. And what you're trying to fight, really, is compaction in the soil. Compaction comes in a couple of forms. One is just the weight of water on it from watering it, snowfall that sits on it. And then, of course, if you have a nice lawn that is recreational in nature, you're going to have people like me walking around on it, and it's going to get compacted. Aeration opens the soil back up, allows nutrients to get down to the root zone, allows also oxygen to get where it needs to be so the grass can access it. Now, when do you aerate your grass? Well, here it is in the burr months in the mountain west of the United States. And the burr months, of course, are September, October, November, and December. Well, it's before Halloween right here. We've had rainfall. The grass is really, at the time of year, because most grasses are cool grass, at least in the area of the country we live in. And so this time of year, the grass really brightens up and starts taking off. Moisture content is higher because it's rained a little bit. And so it's an ideal time to go ahead and aerate. Aerating, then, is done mechanically. We use a small tractor with a pull-behind aerator. Now, sometimes you can go to garden sites, and to be honest with you, there's some gimmicky things out there. Claims like, hey, you know, wear your golf shoes and you can aerate your lawn. It's going to take a lot of walking because it takes a lot of aeration to do good. And the spikes on golf shoes aren't deep enough or long enough to do much good. Then you see these kind of walk-around things with spikes on them. Folks, have you ever tried to wear any of those? It's worse than wearing spike high heels for you women out there trying to aerate. They stick. They're hard to lift your feet out. And, again, to aerate properly and to the level the lawn needs, you've got to do a lot of it. Now, how do you aerate well? Well, we use a mechanical aerator. As you can see here, as the aerator rolls across the grass, notice that there's weights on top of the unit as well. It's driving these hollow, sharp tubes into the ground. And it's opening up plugs, pulling plugs out that are ejected as new soil material is crammed in the bottom. And we're lifting out all sorts of plugs. Now, here is one of the plugs right there that you can see is a plug that's been pulled out. And this is about a day old, and already you can see it decomposing. And you can see here's the top of the grass here, the leaves. You can see also the root matter right here, the crown. And then here's the plug that came out. And when the plug came out, they're usually about that long as well. Some of this decomposed a bit. Now, you may have heard of thatching or dethatching. And that is where you essentially power rake your lawn. And that's to remove all the material that's at the base of the grass. I don't recommend it for a couple reasons. Number one, you want to put back in that material into your soil through mulching. And there's a lot of nitrogen in here. Where do you think all the nutrients go that you pay for when you put in ammonium sulfate or some of the other grass fertilizers? It's to grow top. And that nutrient is residing in that grass. So when you cut it off, and if you just rake it away or power that, dethatch, that sort of thing, you're pulling a lot of this off instead of letting the grass, the lawn, get the benefits of it long term. So don't dethatch. The other reason you don't want to dethatch is, if you notice right here, that's the crown of the grass right in this area. This is where all the root growth occurs going down and the top going up. When you power thatch, dethatch, what you're actually doing is damaging that area. And you really do set your grass back quite a bit, and it has to struggle to come back. So don't do that. Instead, use a good mulching blade on your mower, which has a little wing on the outer tip that creates kind of a vacuum effect when the mower passes over the grass. And it lifts the grass slightly after it's been cut, severed off from the base, and puts it in rotation a couple times so the blade can chop it up into finer sizes and lets it drop down in between. That's why you need to aerate your lawn. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay. If you like this video, please like it. And watch our other video on a product review on the aerator that you saw in the video there. We'll tell you a little bit about that. Thanks for visiting us. We'll see you the next time.