16 Aug What You Need to Know About Aeration, Seeding, and Verticutting
If you are someone who wants a beautiful lawn, then you need to work to maintain it. This includes fertilizing and watering regularly to obtain and maintain that rich green grass. However, it is important to make sure nutrients and seed can make it down properly into the soil. Aeration and verticutting are essential practices for those who want to keep their lawn healthy.
These processes are slightly different, but both work to allow more water and nutrients into your lawn while also removing built-up thatch. Let’s explore aeration, seeding and verticutting, and how they can help you maintain a healthy lawn!
Aeration
This method involves perforating your lawn, usually 3/4″ in diameter and three inches deep. This allows air, water, and nutrients to penetrate deep into the roots of the grass. This process helps the grass grow stronger and deeper. In turn, this produces a healthier and more vigorous looking lawn.
The main reason to aerate a lawn is to combat soil compaction. When the soil gets too compact there is not a proper flow of water, air, and nutrients and the grass suffers as a result. You should probably aerate your lawn if:
It gets used heavily by kids playing, pets, neighborhood cookouts etc.
Was established as part of a newly built home.
It dries out easily or feels spongy.
The best time to aerate your lawn is in the growing season so your grass can properly heal. For cool season grass, ideal aeration should occur in early spring or early fall, and the ideal aeration time for warm season grass is late spring.
Seeding
When it comes to seeding your lawn, timing is everything. If you do not time the process right, the grass will not germinate properly or remain healthy for very long. Timing is everything with lawns and the best times to plant seed vary on the climate and the type of seed being planted.
In most cases the northern portion of the country is going to be planting cool season grass. The best time to plant these types of grass is early fall or early spring. This is when cool season grasses experience their largest growth periods so, if you’re going to plant seeds like Kentucky Blue Grass or tall fescue, you want to plant in early spring or fall.
For the southern region of the United States, a lot of the grass types that thrive and get used in lawns are warm season grasses like Bermudagrass or Zoysia grass. These grasses experience their most active growing periods in late spring to early summer, right before the temperatures really start to heat up.
For full, thick, luscious lawns seeding is an important aspect, and can be done when a lawn is being aerated or verticut too.
Verticutting
This is a similar process to aeration but has a little bit of a different objective. Verticutting is mainly trying to cut through the thatch, so that new seed can make it down into the rich soil and not be stifled on the top by the compact soil and thatch. A verticutting machine cuts small grooves through your lawn’s thatch layer.
This is a great way to get grass to grow in thin areas of your lawn. You may want to contact a local lawn care company to determine if your lawn would benefit from verticutting.
Can You Do All Three?
The answer is yes, if your lawn needs it. Ideally, you won’t need to have all three done at the same time, but if your grass is unhealthy and thin, it is a great idea. The first process needs to be aeration, then you should verticut your lawn in one direction, seed it and verticut it again in the opposite direction of the first cut, to give your seeds the best possible soil bed.
When it comes to healthy lawns it is all about keeping your soil healthy and clean of thatch, which is why aeration and verticutting are great ways to foster healthy soil. Seeding is all about timing. If you get the timing right and you have healthy soil, your lawn will be thick and healthy.
