Get it growing
Do you have a lot of weeds in your lawn? Any areas of thin or dead grass? Does your yard just look stressed overall?
These could all be symptoms of a common problem: soil compaction.
“Soil compaction is soil particles getting pushed closer and closer together, resulting in a loss of pore space for air and water,” explained Eric DeBoer, an assistant professor of turfgrass management with the LSU AgCenter.
Compaction makes for a tough environment for plant roots to grow. It can happen in areas that get a lot of foot or vehicle traffic, and it’s more prevalent in finetextured clay and silt soils.
To test whether your soil is compacted, you can push a screwdriver into the ground. If it’s not relatively easy to insert, your soil is probably compacted.
The fix is a process called aerification or aeration, and spring is a good time to do it.
For the best results, you’ll need to visit an equipment rental facility to borrow a machine called an aerator, a motorized tool that you push like a lawnmower. It has spinning tines that poke holes in the ground and pull out cores of soil. The machine ejects the soil cores as it is pushed across a lawn.
Aeration helps reduce soil density and creates new channels for water, oxygen and nutrients to infiltrate the soil, DeBoer said. That ultimately translates to a healthier yard.
Using an aerator can make a big difference, and one pass over a lawn is typically enough, DeBoer said.
“You may even see a greening effect around each hole within a couple of weeks,” he said.
You can leave the soil cores on the ground. They’ll eventually break down and return some nutrients to the soil.
DeBoer recommends aerating once per growing season or as needed to alleviate major compaction issues.
When renting an aerator, be sure it’s a model that has hollow tines that pull up soil cores. DeBoer advises against using a machine with solid tines or trying to aerate a yard with a pitchfork or other spiky tools because they don’t remove soil.
“Solid tines do create channels in the soil for nutrients and air and may be better than doing nothing at all, but it doesn’t do anything to alleviate soil compaction,” DeBoer said. “If you continue to poke holes to the same depth year after year, you can actually create a hardpan and make the problem worse.”
Eric DeBoer, an assistant professor of turfgrass management with the LSU AgCenter, demonstrates using an aerator. (Olivia McClure/LSU AgCenter)
