Your Questions About Lawn Aeration

landscapeliving answers:

Your lawn needs to get air down into the soil in order to have a healthy environment for soil born organisms. Lawns tend to matt and clump. Rain settles soil and compacts it. Walking and playing on soil compace it.

Once compacted, not only do you not have good air circulation within the soil but water doesn't soak down as well. Basically it kills the life in the soil, thus killing the ability to grow grass or any other plant well except - WEEDS.

landscapeliving answers:

Usually when a lawn is cored the contractor removes them!! Rake them up and like suggested above add them to your compost. You can either leave the holes open or topdress with sand. While the holes are open it is a good time to oversow and to add organic fertiliser.

landscapeliving answers:

Aeration is a great tool for increasing growth and something few people do. Depending on what type of aeration was done, you should be able to see the evidence.

If solid tines where used and pushed into the soil, you should see the holes. If open spoons where used - these pull plugs out of the ground and are the best type of St Aug and sandy soils, the plugs should be on the surface unless they were collected and removed or broken up by dragging. Either way, good aeration is a traumatic event and there should be evidence of it on the lawn.

There is another type of aeration which uses vibrating tines. This is usually called shatter-tine aeration. This process inserts a vibrating solid tine into the soil. The idea is this will create cracks in the soil. However, in sand soils where St Aug is most commonly grow, this does little to truly aerate the soil. Shatter-time aeration leaves little evidence and a good rain afterward could remove the evidence of the process.

Here is a nice publication about turf renovation with pictures of aeration http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/LH032

landscapeliving answers:

It will dry out the root zone that much quicker & require you to water through the summer if you do it now. It would be best to pospone it until early fall.

landscapeliving answers:

Time is perfect, use some inexpensive rye grass seed, lots of water, it should germinate in 10 days max. Then dry it up fast. Mow a stripe pattern in it, very attractive lawn.

Watch out for pythium blight, spray some daconil 2787 to stop warm weather pythium if you see any signs of it. Wait about 2 or 3 weeks and fertilize with potassium, something like 2-5-20
mix, or 0-2-15, to help with winter health.

You can aerate anytime until the ground freezes, gets air to the root system, relieves compaction.