Do you want a nice, healthy lawn?
Silly question, right? Everyone with a lawn wants it to look nice. The way your grass looks has a huge impact on your home’s curb appeal. And it’s not just about looks. A thick, healthy lawn also helps keep weeds from taking over your yard.
When people think of lawn care, mowing, fertilizing, and watering are typically the first tasks that come to mind. Those are the lawn care tasks we do most often. Grass needs water and nutrients to stay healthy, and when grass is healthy and growing it requires frequent mowing.
Beyond those regular lawn care tasks, there’s one more that you won’t want to overlook. Core aeration is something lawns only need once every year or so, but it’s just as important as the more frequent lawn care tasks.
Reduce Soil Compaction
The chief reason why it’s so important to aerate your lawn is to reduce soil compaction. Time spent mowing and enjoying the lawn means foot traffic over the grass that can compact the soil. The heavier the traffic on your lawn, the faster the soil gets packed tight together.
Aerating with a core aerator (which is the best type of equipment for this job) removes regularly spaced cores of lawn soil. That reduces soil compaction and makes it easier for water, air, and nutrients to reach the grass roots.
Help Lawns Stay Healthy
As you can see in the above image, removing soil cores leaves small holes in the lawn that lets oxygen, water, and nutrients reach the grass’s roots. Opening up the soil like this directly improves lawn health and gives the grass more room to grow healthy roots.
The fertilizer and water you add to your lawn become more effective after aeration because they get down deeper into the soil where grass’s roots can get them. Aeration also reduces run-off during rain or irrigation since the water can get down into the soil more easily.
Get Lawns Ready for Summer
You’ll often see websites that suggest aerating in the fall. That recommendation applies to cool-season grass, though. The warm-season grasses that you’re most likely to find in Texas benefit from yearly lawn aeration in the late spring or early summer between March 15th and May 1st.
Most homeowners won’t want to buy a core aerator. They’re expensive pieces of equipment and you’ll only use them once a year. Instead, you can rent an aerator or hire a lawn care professional to take care of aeration. Try to schedule aeration on a day with mild weather, and water the lawn a day or two before aerating. You’ll also want to make the year’s first fertilizer application a few days after aerating.
You don’t need to aerate your lawn very often but making sure you aerate once a year—or every couple of years if your lawn doesn’t get much traffic—will help keep lawn grass healthy. And the healthier your lawn is, the better it will look and the easier it will be to take care of.
