Aerate Your Lawn – By Hannah Odneal Newman

As long as the ground isn’t frozen, conditions are ideal for spring aeration. Since we’ve had an unusually warm winter here in the Grand Valley of Western Colorado, the time to aerate is here. Aeration machines perforate your lawn and pull out small cores of soil and thatch. The process is known by a few other names such as core cultivation, coring, spiking, or slicing. To the untrained eye, the soil cores scattered on lawns may look like dog droppings, but the benefits are stench free, long lasting, and numerous. The cores also break down and disappear on their own rather quickly, especially if run over with one of our mulching bladed mowers.

The holes created allow air, water, and nutrients to penetrate deeper into the soil, encouraging the grass roots to grow deeper, which in turn produces a heartier grass plant. Aeration also reduces soil compaction and thatch build-up. A lawn made up of hearty plants with deep roots, and minimal thatch requires less routine maintenance and less frequent watering. We recommend aerating your lawn twice a year. Once in the spring and once in the fall. Especially when done routinely, aerating is a great way to invigorate and strengthen your lawn.

While we admire the ambition of the folks who strap aerating spikes to their shoes and slowly walk their lawn, at Maple Leaf Landscaping we would advise against this method. It just doesn’t remove adequate cores and actually worsens soil compaction.

Among our fleet of professional, commercial grade lawn maintenance equipment are our motorized aerating machines. They ensure extraction of properly sized and evenly spaced cores, to maximize air, water, and nutrient delivery to where it is most needed and best utilized. Call Maple Leaf Landscaping & Maintenance at (970)234-9691 to schedule your spring aeration and other seasonal lawn maintenance needs today! We look forward to working with you.

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