subject: The Importance Of Lawn Aeration As A Lawn Care Strategy Examined [print this page] Reading through modern lawn care literature, one strategy that seems to be getting widespread endorsement, as one of the ways through which you can increase your lawn care success, is lawn aeration. Our focus then, will be to try and understand what the said lawn aeration is, the role it can actually play in lawn care, and whether it is really necessary as a lawn care strategy.
Starting with the first element of our discussion, which is to understand what lawn aeration, it turns out that lawn aeration is simply the set of steps that are taken to ensure optimal penetration of air into the lawn's soil.
The lawn's soil, as indeed any sort of soil, is actually a living entity. It is unfortunate that many people don't tend to see soil as a living thing. Granted, the soil particles may be inorganic rock fragmentations which have become refined over the years; but in order for them to be in a position to support life, they need organic matter. In any case, when we talk of the soil, we are not just referring to the rock fragments, but also the flora and fauna that lives in them. It is these (micro-plants and micro-animals) that live in the soil that, when they eventually die, provide nutrition to the bigger plants that are planted on the soil. When we say that soil is infertile, one of the things we mean is that it has become depleted of this organic matter. And seeing that in a lawn setting, this flora and fauna resident on the soil is likely to play an important role in supporting the lawn plant life, it becomes the lawn manager's best interests to support the flora and fauna's optimal wellbeing. One way to do so is by ensuring that they get adequate air to breath' through lawn aeration.
The importance of lawn aeration goes beyond supporting lawn soil flora and fauna. In order to understand the other (even more compelling) benefits of lawn aeration, it is important for us to first understand how the aeration is done. This is where it turns out that aerating a lawn is simply about breaking its soil, to allow for the entry of air. You could do it with a sharp stick, or you could do it with a certain purpose-designed mechanical implement But the bottom-line is to ensure that holes are pored on the lawn's surface, to allow for air to penetrate deep into the lawn's soil.
Now in the process of breaking the soil for air to penetrate (which is what lawn aeration is all about), you also end up loosening the soil, making it easy for the lawn plants' roots to penetrate deeper and get better resources for the plants. This is yet another benefit of lawn aeration: making for better root penetration. It is important to recall that one of the reasons some plants experience stunted growth is where the roots face obstacles when attempting to penetrate the soil in search of life support resources for the plants.
Another benefit of lawn aeration (inasmuch as it involves breaking the soil) is that it allows for better penetration of other lawn life support resources things like water and fertilizers, which often also translates to a number of benefits for the lawn plants. If something like water finds the soil too hard, it simply tends to flow away, leaving the plants thirsty, and naturally hindering their growth.
The Importance Of Lawn Aeration As A Lawn Care Strategy Examined
