You want to aerate your lawn when your lawn is at its peak growth period so that it can recover quickly, whether it's early spring or fall for cold-season grasses, and late spring to early summer for warm-season grasses. If you have high-traffic areas or heavy clay soils, you'll want to air every year. The best time for aeration is during the growing season, when the lawn can heal and fill in any open area after removing earthen plugs. The ideal is to aerate lawns with cold season grass in early spring or fall and those with warm season grass in late spring.
Aeration is a lawn care practice designed to create openings in the lawn and the underlying soil structure in order to penetrate the root and straw layer and allow essential water and air to enter the soil, where it can best reach the roots. Aeration can be an extremely vital element for a healthy lawn because it allows air and water to penetrate accumulated grass or grass straw. Constant aeration keeps your lawn healthy and green, saving you dry grass, unsightly brown spots, and turf problems on the road. Whenever possible, combine lawn aeration with other lawn care maintenance, such as fertilizing, adding soil amendments, or planting.
The basic idea behind lawn aeration is that, just like you, your lawn and the soil beneath it need to breathe. If you don't know when or how to aerate your lawn and prefer not to have to figure it out, hire a lawn aeration service. Whether you use a spike lawn aerator equipped with solid wedge-shaped tines that drill holes in the soil or a core aerator equipped with hollow teeth that remove soil, your lawn aerator will penetrate more easily and can create deeper holes when the soil is wet.
