How To Aerate A Lawn

Hi. I'm Mike and this is Dan, and we're from The Lawn Company. We have a wealth of experience in looking after lawns, large and small.

We're going to show you some handy tips on how to care for your lawn. I'm going to show you how to aerate a lawn. The reasons why we aerate a lawn is to allow better drainage for water passing through the soil, to aid better rooting of grasses in the soil and to let the good air in and the bad air out.

For a small lawn, the common garden fork will be adequate for the task. Work down your mowing strips, working about one foot centered, ideally on a lawn that's already been scarified. Try and work these fork tines into the soil as deep as you can.

If your budget can stretch to a little bit more than a garden fork, but not to that of a mechanical aerator, you may consider a handy little gadget like this air drain fork. You'll see in this example today, that we've got different tines. The reason for these different tines: they do slightly different jobs.

This nine-inch solid tine is for deep aeration. It really, really does allow air percolation. This tine here is a little over-seeding tine, a little sort of pricking tine, which is very handy after droughts.

And this tine here is known as a hollow core tine. What'll happen is as this goes into the ground, the core that it's taken out of the ground will come out. Use it exactly like you use a garden fork, really work it into the surface.

As you'll see, as I'm using it, the cores are falling out of the hollow core tine. And that's how you aerate your lawn. .