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Lawn Aeration
Hollowtine Aeration
Hollowtine aeration is the process of mechanically removing cores of soil from the lawn to allow oxygen, nutrients and water to penetrate into the root zone. Aerating helps relieve compaction caused by heavy foot traffic and provides an ideal seed bed for over seeding. Please see the diagram in the video above, which illustrates a lawn before, immediately following and some 8 – 10 weeks post aeration.
Lawntech also carries out solid tine aeration in situations where hollowtine aeration might not be appropriate, for example, on heavy clay soil where lots of cores left on the surface could be problematic or in situations where quick recovery is essential.
Aeration can be carried out at anytime of year providing the ground is not too dry, frozen or water-logged, with prime time being in the Autumn and Spring.
10 Good Reasons to Aerate your Lawn
- Relieves soil compaction
- Releases toxic chemicals
- Increases biological activity
- Root prunes
- Helps water penetration
- Assists nutrient efficiency
- Improves surface drainage
- Allows air into the root zone
- Penetrates sub surface thatch
- Reduces moss infestation
Video Transcript
JIM: The benefit of aeration is often underestimated and the process creates an environment which helps your lawn to thrive. Ideally lawns should be aerated every year as it helps to relieve compaction, reduce the sub-surface thatch and allows water and nutrient deep into the root zone.
CHRIS: We’ll be using this machine, it’s a professional groundsman machine and today we’re using hollow core tines. Now there is a various number of tines we can use on this machine itself. We can use solid tines or a cluster of tines which gets more and more holes in there. These tines that we have fitted are side release so it punches a hole and a core will sit in there and after that the core will be released and come out the side there. The way this machine works isn’t as simple as it just going in and out, up and down in a straight line, it actually goes in an eclipse which means it has a heave on it. So as it goes into the ground it will heave it up and then break separating with fissures in the actual soil itself which lets all that oxygen in which is exactly what we’re looking for.
ADAM: Here we have our tractor mounted groundsman aerator. We use this on our large lawns. It works exactly the same way as our pedestrian equipment but we’re able to cover large areas very quickly.
JIM: As you can see we’ve now carried out hollow tine aeration on this lawn with our compact tractor mounted aerator. We’ve created thousands of holes in this lawn now so that we can complete the process with over seeding. The nice thing about aerating before you carry out over seeding is that it creates soil contact for the seed which is much more likely to create good germination for the lawn to recover as we go into the autumn and through next year.
We call it bringing a little bit of green keeping to the garden.