Lawn experts advise homeowners to have their lawns aerated with a "coring" or "plugging" machine, so lawns or roots can "breathe". It sounds like a good idea (unless your lawn is already too thin), and looks impressive when done, but does this practice alone actually provide any real long-term benefit or real change to your soil or lawn? Does the soil actually become better aerated or more porous, or are the holes just temporary openings that fill back in quickly?
According to research reported in the Cornell Turfgrass ShortCutt (5/24/10), coring 2 times a year on a poor soil, over a 3 year period, showed no soil improvement benefit. So perhaps it is time to rethink the subject.
Improving soil aeration is extremely beneficial to lawns and gardens growing in clay or compacted soil. It will help water move down into the root zone easily. In well-aerated soils, beneficial soil microbes (that need air to survive) can thrive and create humus and improve soil structure. Roots get deeper and nutrients are exchanged more easily. Good topsoils are naturally aerated.
Unfortunately, most suburban lots have had the topsoil stripped off and homeowners are left with a denser clay or subsoil in which to grow their lawns and gardens. If you were planting a new lawn in this clay you could till in tons of compost and other amendments to improve aeration. But on established lawns this is not an option.
We suggest trying a new approach to improving your soil quality, and we call this “liquid aeration”. We've been doing liquid aerations, instead of coring, for close to 20 years, and have witnessed real soil improvement. * Liquid Aeration is simply a solution of amendments that get into the root zone quickly and create microscopic pores and channels that help with water and air movement. It also adds organic ingredients that generate and feed microbes, leading to humus and a restructuring of the clay.The product we use, and manufacture is called Aerify PLUS.
Liquid Aeration can be done throughout the growing season for continuous soil improvement. Core aeration, on the other hand, is usually recommended to be done only in the fall (in the north), because there is less likelihood of weeds sprouting at that time of the year. When coring is done in the spring, the holes created by the removed plugs of grass will expose the ready-to-sprout weed seeds to open space and sunlight. With liquid aeration, no holes are made and no grass is removed. Additonally, you can use Liquid Aeration on all your garden bed, plants and trees to improve soil compaction, drainage and rooting.
A good liquid aeration solution would contain, at minimum, a good soil surfactant or wetting agent. This is a soap-like product that helps thin out water and reduce surface tension, breaking up dirt (clay) and creates microscopic channels for air and water to move through. Surfactants have been a staple in the agriculture and golf course industries for decades. There is a broad range in the quality and harshness of surfactants. We suggest using one that is completely biodegradable with no anti-bacterial components.
Temporary pores and channels in the clay will allow soil-building microbes to generate, especially if you put in a readily available organic food source. It is these microbes, along with earthworms, that do the work of creating humus and restructuring the clay into aggregates of soil with airspace between them.
Carbon is the basic food for soil microbes. Compost contains a lot of available carbon, and can be made into a tea to mix with the surfactant. But what may be the best and most concentrated source of carbon is a substance called Humic Acid. , which is like an extremely rich Liquid Compost Tea. The benefits of humic acid on normal soils are many, but when you combine humic acids with a good soil surfactant, clay soils will achieve these benefits much more rapidly.
You can add trace elements, hormones, plant growth stimulators (all found in kelp), molasses, enzymes, earthworm casting tea and even beneficial root fungi to a liquid aeration solution. You can add fish emulsion if you want to fertilize a bit at the same time and don’t mind the odor. When the soil is treated with a surfactant all of these things will work much better.
For true soil improvement you can make regular applications over time and enjoy watching your dense clay gradually change into a real soil, loaded with worms and humus. The worse the clay, the more often you will initially need to apply your liquid aeration. Due to the magnetic-like nature of microscopic clay particles, they will always want to re-bond no matter how good the soil structure gets. For bad clays we suggest monthly applications, with perhaps 2 the first month. Keep this up and eventually you’ll start to see obvious changes occurring in such things as drainage, root depth, soil structure and color too. Continued applications should work deeper and deeper into the ground.
Many of you have had your lawns core aerated year after year. But can you honestly say that you have noticed anything at all in terms of better soil quality? Didn't think so. It is time to take a different approach. We suggest you try Liquid Aeration this fall.
* Nature's Lawn & Garden does over 2500 applications of Liquid Aeration a year, and zero Core Aerations. Our Aerify PLUS product is used by home owners, landscapers, schools and athletic fields across the US.
Stuart Franklin
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