Renovating your lawn by aerating, over-seeding, and top-dressing

Spring is here, and that means it’s time to give your lawn a healthy, natural boost by aerating, over-seeding, and top-dressing. This triple-combination lawn practice is a key way to maintain a natural, organic lawn. Doing this once every couple years will help you maintain a green healthy lawn without the use of pesticides.

Some companies may only aerate your lawn, but we feel your lawn benefits most when you also over-seed (spread grass seed) and top-dress (spread a thin layer of compost over your lawn). Here’s how and why we do it:

First, we aerate your lawn. Why aerate? Over time, lawns become compacted from heavy use; each time your pets, kids and others walk across or play on the lawn, all that foot traffic presses down on the soil, making it harder for the grass roots to take up water and other nutrients. That greatly reduces air pockets in your soil. Grass (and other roots) require oxygen to grow and absorb nutrients and water. When we aerate your lawn, we use a mechanical aerator that pulls out small plugs of soil from the lawn about one to two inches in length. This creates little air pockets that allow water, fertilizers and other nutrients to move to the root zone more easily. These air pockets improve the lawn’s ability to absorb rain and prevents fertilizers from running off the lawn surface. The soil plugs are left on the lawn, because they’ll eventually break down and work back into the soil.

Second, we over-seed your lawn, which means we’ll spread a Northwest blend of grass seed over your lawn to help fill in bare patches. Spring is a good time to aerate, over-seed and top-dress because weather is important. Grass seed needs roughly 60F temps to germinate. Put it down too early in the winter and it just rots or gets eaten by birds. Put it down too late in the summer and you’ll have to baby-sit it with a sprinkler to keep it from drying out.

Finally, we top-dress the lawn, which involves spreading a thin layer of compost on top of your lawn. Compost is great for building healthy soil in landscape and garden beds; the same is true for your lawn. Healthy lawns require healthy soil. We’ll rake a thin layer of compost over your lawn (with some filling the aeration holes), where it will gradually move to the soil below the grass. Top-dressing with compost helps soils use fertilizer more efficiently and adds nutrients. It’s a good idea to top-dress your lawn once a year to restore soil humus.

Contact us today to setup a consultation if you’d like help with lawn renovation services.