A Lawn Aerator is used to help maintain a healthy lawn. They are available in a number of forms including mechanical lawn aerators that are available for hire and manual lawn aerators suitable for home garden use. Lawn aerators revitalize compacted lawns by allowing air water and fertilizers to penetrate deep into the lawn.
The question is, do they work ?
Soil compaction is one of the main problems that affects lawns. Lawn Aerators relieve soil compaction and allow fertilizers, air and water to penetrate deep into the soil to promote a strong root system and healthy growth
Lawn Aerators come in two main forms.
These are Spike Aerators and Core Aerators and they work very differently to each other.
- Spike aerators drive holes into the lawn a regular intervals that allows water and fertilizer to penetrate.
- Core aerators actually remove a small plug of soil from the lawn.
It is best to aerate your lawn before re seeding or topdressing. Once a year is usually adequate for most lawns, although clay soils will benefit from a twice yearly aeration. For most lawns aeration is best carried out in late winter to early spring.
Types of Lawn Aerators.
- Lawn aerator shoes
They are little bit of a novelty to us, we did try them, once, and thought that the idea was good, but it just did not work. - Rolling lawn aerators
These require a little weight to work well and it actually needs to remove plugs from the soil to work well. The spikes that just punch a small hole into the ground are not really that efficient in our experience. - Mechanical Lawn Corers.
Now these actually do something, and you can achieve some effect, you can hire these and they are easy to use and efficient. Usually they look like a rotary hoe, with a different head attachment.