What about you! Today we're going to be doing a Video in lawn aeration - and as it even needed.
I've been giving you the wrong information on something, we're going to have to clear that
up later. Let's go .......... How do you know your lawn needs to be aerated? I'm going to talk about a
few different things that can show you that your lawn needs to be aerated. Now if you're looking at
your lawn and it has a lot of moss in it, and it's starting to have bare patches, well then that's
a pretty good sign that it's suffering from compaction and the roots can't get down in.
If after heavy rainfall there's a lot of puddles around your lawn, then those areas
there, that's the places I would start where the puddles are. Heavy clay soils, or garden with a lot
of thatch, they're going to need to be aerated more often just due to the nature of the soil.
If your lawn sees a lot of use from kids playing, or sports, or just general use are going to need to
be aerated more often. Lately I've been getting a lot of questions why aerating is even needed.
To make that a bit easier I've come over to the compost heap. Now compost or soil while it looks and
it smells, it smells like a pile of muck, there's actually billions of life forms
in your soil. They say between 10 billion and a trillion life forms in a bit of soil.
And it's a really diverse ecosystem, it may have viruses, it might have fungi, might have nematodes.
Lots of microscopic bacteria life forms live in healthy soil. They're all really important
in helping break down the organic matter and supporting the building blocks for your plants' growth.
It's a jungle down here underneath your lawn, and it's often easy to forget that your
lawn's alive, and the more you can work with it the better it'll be. Now I hear you say, "Robbie, this is
all very interesting, but what''s all this got to do with my lawn and aeration?". Whenever we improve
the soil structure, then we're gonna increase the pore spacing. Aeration can also improve
the soil and help with your drainage. It's going to prevent the risk of water logging, and that's going
to make a more hospitable soil or environment for the life forms that are in it. Now - let's go
into the workshop and have a look at some of the different tools that we can use to aerate our lawn.
Welcome into the workshop. We're going to have a chat about different types of aeration, the tools that you
would use and when you would use them. So number one, we're going to talk about this
drill with the auger bit on it. Really good if you have bad soil and you want
to replace some of it drill this down into the ground puts a lovely big hole into the ground
and then you can fill that hole with whatever you want, compost, sand, stones etc. The next tool that
I'm going to say that you can use to aerate your lawn, is the, is our old favorite, which is the fork.
We've talked about the fork quite a lot in this Channel. Some people will tell you that whenever
you put the fork into the ground because you're not removing any material you're compacting the
hole on the way down. While that may be true, the fork's very good, and it mimics something that the
professional groundsmen do. They use a machine called a verti drainer that goes down in the ground and
it pivots and then it comes out. And what that does, it creates fissures in the soil, that lets
the water penetrate deep down in. The name of the machine it's called a vertidrainer,
a vertical drainer, so that's what we're going to do with the fork, and that's what we're doing
as well with the drill, but because you're going deep down in. Places where I would use the fork
first of all would be walk on and off areas of the lawn, or places where you're getting a lot of puddles.
The next tool I'm gonna to talk about are the shoes. Now, if you go onto Amazon and you type in "aerator"
these are going to be pretty high on the list. I don't believe that these do a great job, because
the spikes on them aren't deep enough, and they're not thick enough, you're not really doing anything
plus you risk the damage of hurting your ankles walking about with these stupid things on. For
aeration what I recommend is hollow core, for most places I would hollow core. The benefit between
hollow coring is, you're pulling out that little core. The reason why we're hollow core is because we're
removing thatch from the lawn, so we're helping with compaction plus we're removing thatch. Now
there's different tools you can use to aerate your lawn. Again if you're looking on Amazon,
chances are you're going to see a tool like this. The downside to these tools is that there's no
side core ejection, so whenever you push this under the ground upside down
whenever you push this into the ground the core has to go from here to here and push
out the top. This generally doesn't happen, and as you can see these get blocked up.
for aerating lawns, and if you want to do it manually, I've reached out to a company called Garden Imports
Limited. They Supply these aerators, I believe these are the best aerators on the market for
manual use. Some of the reasons why I like it, I'm gonna now I'm going to leave an Affiliated Link
down below. If you want to buy one off my Link just to let you know it helps support the Channel.
The reason I like these? They're stainless steel, they're really really well made, you can take the
cores off, you can take the hollow cores off, they come with spare parts, and then put these on.
So what's the difference between these and the fork? I'm going to say probably not very much.
The spikes are maybe for somebody that has a Swordman lawnmower, Swordman aerator. You want
all the Swordman gear you may as well have these too. Before we go back down into the garden
and do some aeration, what I would like to say is it's more important that you do the aeration as
opposed to how you do it with, if you don't have any of the fancy tools to do it with you can do
it with a fork or the drill or whatever you like. More the fact that you do it than you don't do it
first up we'll have our fork, pretty simple put it in, give it a wiggle.
We have these ankle breakers
for the spikes that attach onto my feet under my shoes. I'm only going to wear one, because
the last time I had them on I nearly damaged myself, so I just need to be careful with them.
You can hardly see the holes that they make at all. For me, these things here are useless.
place where these belong, and I'll show you now,
in the bin.
As we talked about in the workshop, these are meant to eject out the top, but they didn't, as you can see here
there's no cores lying on the lawn. Next up we're going to try the auger. This is really good if you
want to change, if you want to put some compost down into your soil. I'll show you that now.
To show you with this stick how deep we went. You could go deeper if you wanted. Now I would
suggest if you were going to do this on different areas, you would stick to smaller areas but if
you had really bad soil here, you could put holes all over your lawn and fill those with compost.
You can see the difference, this tool here, really hard to get into that one wee bit of ground,
this one here went in really easily. It also pulled out, it pulled out our lovely cores.
This one here didn't pull out any cores and was really hard work. If you have a larger lawn you'll
probably want to, to go to a hire shop and get the likes of this machine here, which is a
a power aerator, much much faster for doing larger areas, however it comes at a cost.
I said at the start of the Video that I was wrong with something. Now you can see the
cores that have come out of this lawn. They recommend that you leave the cores lying on
top of the lawn for the bacteria, whenever they start to break down you're going to
help get the bacteria down into the soil. I'm going to say, that comes with a caveat. If you
have a very clay lawn and you're pulling out little clay plugs, then you're probably
wanting to clear them up afterwards . It's going to come down to personal preference.
So as you can see, we use that machine to remove the cores off.
I'm not a fan of leaving them on the lawn but if you want to leave them on the lawn that's fine. Now
if you've enjoyed this Video I think you'll really enjoy this - so watch this next!