Simply put, is lawn aeration necessary? Yes, it is! The question you need to ask yourself is whether your lawn qualifies for aeration or not. While lawns can go on without actually needing core aeration, it doesn’t mean that lawn aeration is unimportant. Most lawns can go on for years with only mowing and water. What the answer depends upon is the amount of use your lawn goes under on a regular basis. If your lawn is in regular use, then chances are you have noticed that the lawn is starting to look dry and lifeless. Even though you water your lawn and mow it on a regular basis. What you do not realize is that all the water and mowing is not doing any good. It’s not working due to the heavy use of your lawn, and because the soil has become compacted.
Introducing fertilizer and water is not going to do any good for the lawn. The nutrients won’t penetrate to the bottom to get to the roots. Compression makes the soil almost impermeable to the water and nutrients. This leads to patches of dead grass in your lawn and eventually water logging. Water will not soak all the way down to the bottom. It will start to sit on top and stagnate, causing more problems. Algae will start to form and eat away at the, already scarce nutrients.
That is where Lawn Aeration comes in to play. Lawn aeration is going to make room for the soil to relax and spread out evenly, making space for the fresh fertilizer introduced to the lawn. The water will now seep all the way to the bottom and reach the roots. Lawn aeration helps by making space between the soil so that existing soil has more room to spread and that reduces compression.
A common mistake that people end up making is choosing the wrong aeration tool. What you need is a plug aerator. This device pulls out cylindrical cores of earth from the ground that will give a lot more room for the soil to spread out and give more room for the new fertilizer to penetrate the soil all the way to the bottom.
During aeration, there is always compression and that is another reason why removing plugs is a better practice than puncturing the surface with spikes because that will just compress the ground even more than before and will often lead to lower yield in the future.
All in all, aeration is rather important for your lawn but it is not something you do on the regular. What you need to do is learn to identify symptoms that pop up when you are dealing with your lawn so that when you start to experience them you know it is time to aerate. Aeration, when done right, is always going to help your lawn and rarely is it going to harm it. That is the key to a healthy lawn.