Your Ultimate Guide To Lawn Core Aeration In The Midwest

Do the beautiful, thick lawns of your surrounding houses make you feel jealous? Do you wonder how those homeowners manage to get and keep such lawns? If your answer to these is a resounding “Yes”, let us assure you that it is not an uphill task to achieve a healthier, thicker, and lusher lawn provided you manage to take optimal lawn care. As one of the frontrunners in the lawn care service landscape in St. Louis, Missouri, we frequently come across lots of questions from our clients regarding proper lawn care with a particular focus on lawn aeration. Instead of answering those questions in different posts, we decided to come up with this lawn care guide while emphasizing core aeration. This piece would act as a one-stop knowledge base and help you achieve, as well as, maintain a stunning lawn.

What Is Aeration All About?

When we play on, walk over, run around, and enjoy the lawn with family, friends, and pets, we unintentionally give rise to soil compaction. And when the soil becomes compacted, it starts making the turf grass roots weaker by obstructing them from receiving adequate amounts of air, water, and fertilizer. This, in turn, leads to a growing environment detrimental for grass, which finally results in a thin, unhealthy lawn. By performing lawn aeration, you break up the soil compaction and let the grass grow easily, which ultimately improves your lawn’s vigor and its ability to remain green for a longer period of time. While soil compaction is simply unavoidable, lawn aeration, performed by a top-tier lawn care service provider, would help you achieve and maintain a fully-nourished, beautiful lawn.

General Benefits of Lawn Aeration

If you still need some reasons to be convinced about why you should schedule periodic lawn aeration, here are the undeniable benefits of the practice that should help make up your mind.

Relief From Soil Compaction

As we have already touched upon, soil compaction plays a crucial role in preventing various essential elements from reaching the root system of your lawn, which eventually leads to thinning of grass, patches, dead spots, etc. The aeration process is designed to decrease soil density and thus, eliminates the probability for lawn grasses struggling to get their basic needs fulfilled.

Improved Lawn Health

Aeration process provides the grass roots with an adequate space to grow and stretch out, which in turn, helps the lawn to become more dense and vigorous. As a result, it becomes less vulnerable to thatch buildup and diseases, over time.

Typically, aeration comes with no side effects and over time, it helps to lower water runoff, which increases lawn tolerance to drought and heat.

How to Understand If Your Lawn Needs Aeration

A lot of homeowners often fail to understand if their lawn is due for aeration. Here, we have jotted down the most common symptoms that would help you assess the need.

• If your lawn begins to feel spongy and the soil quickly dries out, you should consider doing aeration.
• If you notice there is a significant thatch problem, check out the depth of the thatch layer. If it is more than one-half inch, you should go for aeration.
• If the lawn gets heavy use such as from construction workers doing renovation works or from regular running around of lots of kids and/or pets, soil compaction would start to form. This makes the lawn a potential candidate for aeration.
• If the soil has a layer of another fine-textured soil, the layering might trigger poor drainage. It often results in compacted conditions that you need to break down through aeration to promote healthy grass root development.
• If you notice that after rain, the lawn has puddles of water remaining all over it, there has to be a severe compaction issue and hence, it needs aeration to promote smooth drainage.

Another simple yet highly effective way to identify the compaction problem is to use a shovel. Just stick the blade of the shovel into the soil and see how it resists. If you feel that the soil needs additional bodyweight to be applied to get pierced, it would probably be highly dense for healthy grass and thus, need lawn aeration.

We strongly suggest at least annual aeration to help your lawn maintain optimal health, even if you don’t observe any of the above symptoms. You should understand that being a living organism, it has to get adequate amounts of elements essential for maintaining optimum health. And through aeration, you provide it with better ventilation and easy access to those essentials. Since it often becomes quite difficult to properly assess whether your lawn is due for aeration or not, it is always advisable to consult an adept lawn care service provider to examine it for you.

What Is Core Aeration?

Now that you have got an overview of lawn aeration and the benefits it offers, let us take a look at core aeration. Two methods are commonly used when it comes to aerating a lawn – core aeration and spike aeration. In core aeration, hollow tines are used to remove plugs or cores of soil, which are then spread across the lawn’s surface. On the contrary, in spike aeration, the soil is not removed. Instead, a spike aerator is used to create holes in the lawn. However, this method is not as effective as core aeration in terms of providing passages for air, water, and other nutrients to deeply enter the soil. A core aerator helps you make bigger holes, which means the soil gets an optimal chance of absorbing those elements essential for making a lawn grassy and clean.

When Should You Perform Core Aeration In The Midwest?

Whether you live in Oakville, MO, or Mehlville, MO, or in any other area bearing postal codes 63128, 63129, etc, you are most likely to experience both bone-chilling cold as well as scorching summers. As a result, many homeowners feel overwhelmed when it comes to deciding the right time for lawn care. There are lots of people who may suggest the best time for aerating your lawn in this region would be spring but we think it is best to do it in the fall. This is because you get cooled off temperatures together with active growth of grasses and minimal weed pressure. Also, in fall, it is quite natural that you would be spending more and more time out on the lawn with your family, friends, and pets. As a result, the soil of the lawn becomes compacted more easily. By doing core aeration during this time, you would be able to provide the soil with ample room for letting healthy grass grow. In addition, most of the grasses experience the maximum root growth during this season, which means there will be a probability for them to grow faster. While fall is the best time for lawn aeration, you may need to do it based on the circumstances. For instance, if you notice the soil of the lawn has become so compacted that it keeps existing grass from growing, you may need to aerate, regardless of the season. Still, you should never go for any kind of lawn aeration when there is a probability of experiencing abnormally cold temperatures. This might cause some grass roots to die, especially which are close to the core holes’ edge.

Along with the season, the amount of moisture present in the soil is another key consideration to perform core aeration. To get the maximum results, the soil has to be moist enough so that the tines can be penetrated into the ground. Ideally, you should either provide the lawn with an adequate amount of water or wait for good rainfall before doing the aeration.

It is clear from the above that both the type of grass you have in the lawn and the right amount of moisture in the soil also play extremely important roles in bringing the desired results from core aeration your way. Assessing all these and more factors to decide on the right time for lawn aeration may become difficult for the average homeowner. That is why we would again suggest you contact a reputable lawn service provider to ensure you get the aeration job done with maximum proficiency and get a healthy lawn.

Specific Advantages of Core Aeration during fall in the Midwest

Let us take a look at some of the specific advantages of scheduling a core aeration service in the fall.

Get Rid Of The Weeds

Weeds are a strong competitor to grass when it comes to absorbing water, sunlight, and other nutrients. The more weeds your lawn has, the fewer amounts of essential resources the grass will receive. By controlling the weeds, you will be able to eliminate the competition and ensure the grasses stay well-nourished and thick. Many weed seeds germinate in the spring which means if you aerate your lawn at that time, you would be offering them the perfect habitat to grow. On the contrary, once your lawn is aerated in the fall and proper weed killers are applied, it will minimize the number of weeds appearing in the springtime.

Smooth Overseeding Operations

If your goal is overseeding, the comfortable environment will make the process easier compared to other seasons. You can start seeding into your existing lawn after core aeration is done and the cultivated soil will not only help with the germination but create a protected, moist environment advantageous for seeding growth as well.

A Greener Spring

When you pair fall fertilization with fall aeration, you can rest assured of having your lawn prepared for offering you a greener spring. Once the core aeration process is done, fertilize the soil to help it absorb the nutrients more effectively. In addition, aerating and fertilizing in the fall will provide the grasses with an adequate amount of time before the winter frost steps in.

Apart from these, by opting for core aeration in the fall, you would be able to gain some more benefits. For one, as this process breaks the compaction of soil down, it leaves behind small plugs of soil. Within a couple of weeks, those plugs not only dissolve into the environment but they help soil microbes break down the thatch layer as well.

Why Should You Leave The Aeration Job To The Specialists?

There are two ways core aeration can be done – either you can do it yourself or hire a professional lawn care service provider. While the former method may sound tempting, we strongly suggest you take the latter route. Since lawn aeration is a combination of various factors including the right techniques, professional expertise, and industry best practices, only a reputable lawn service company can help you achieve the best results.

Typically, experienced lawn care service providers come with all the necessary licenses that not only stand testimony to their expertise and quality of service but ensure the use of proper tools as well, which would prevent your lawn from being impacted negatively. In addition, these providers generally stay up-to-date with advanced technologies that are being used in the industry. It means by hiring one of them, you can rest assured of having the latest aeration methods applied to your lawn.

Parting Thoughts

As you have probably understood from the above, core aeration service is of the utmost importance when it comes to achieving a healthy, thick lawn. And periodic lawn care would become a much cost-effective and easier process when you let your lawn get a robust, healthy foundation. As we have said earlier, some jobs are best handled by professionals and lawn care is one of them. If you are thinking about the prices, we have seen that hiring a reputable lawn care service provider to do your lawn aeration will cost you almost the same as doing it yourself, especially when you factor in things like rent of the equipment, costs of fertilizer and seed, etc. So, do your lawn (and yourself) a favor by handing over the core aeration job to a reputable service provider. And after that, all you need to do is sit back, relax, and see how the team’s industry knowledge and professional expertise provide your lawn with the highest quality of services and help it become the most beautiful yard in the locality.