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Why Aerate in the Spring?
Like the insect half of Spring's unofficial mascot, humans are abuzz with activity this season of renewal. Inside, Spring cleaning is the rage as families prepare for the changes summer will bring with vacations, visitors, and teens moving out or in. Outside, like those bees, we're focused on flower beds, lawn maintenance, and more! So with all that activity, why on earth would we load on another chore in lawn aeration? Well, though there's hardly a wrong time to aerate your lawn in El Dorado, there are many excellent reasons for aeration, and a few that make Spring the season to do it. Today, we'll plant the seeds of knowledge!
What's Lawn Aeration?
For those of you who are old hats at landscaping or rabid readers of the Divine chomping at the bit every Monday for a new one, the subject of lawn aeration will not be new to you. Feel free to skip our intro section to move on to the new stuff if you like. For the rest of you, a definition, or at least a review, is in order. Like many of our favorite words, the meaning of aeration is not difficult to guess from the word itself. It's the process of adding air. You've seen it used in water and in flour. With flour, professional or home bakers run their flour through a sifter to make the flourless dense, aiming for light and fluffy cakes, biscuits, or other tasty treats. Lawn aeration is similar.
Really More Like Soil Aeration
Though we say lawn aeration, it would be more accurate to say soil aeration since, in reality, we're adding air to the soil beneath the lawn. But unlike flour, we can't pour it through anything since it's pretty permanently stationary. So how do we do it?How Does It Work?
Since we can't bring the soil to the aerator, we bring the aerator to the earth. Then, we aerate by poking holes in the soil. There are two types of aerators, ones that roll over the ground and poke holes and ones that pull up plugs of dirt. Ideally, you should use a soil plug aerator because it pulls up earth plugs. This type of professional aeration is beneficial because it doesn't drive the earth further down in the places where it pokes.And Why Do We Do It?
It's not enough to know why we do something. To truly understand it, we need to know why. So what's the point of airy soil? Dense soil is bad for your plants. Your root systems can't thrive in soil that is so compact they can't grow. Further, it's difficult for water to percolate down into the roots of your plants, which means that dense soil leads to unhealthy and, eventually, dead grass.Ok, One More Question
So why'd the soil get so dense anyway? Natural settlement can cause your soil to get denser. So does walking on the lawn and erosion. As soil erodes, you can lose grass, causing more erosion and denser soil where it used to be. You could say that the effect compacts.