Aerators

A lawn aerator is a garden tool designed to aerate the soil in which lawn grasses grow. Aeration improves soil drainage and encourages worms, microfauna and microflora which require oxygen. more...

Lawn problems

Lawn aeration constitutes two things, controlling lawn thatch and reducing soil compaction. Lawn thatch is a layer of dead organic tissue that deprives the lawn from much-needed oxygen. Soil compaction makes it difficult for grass to root and it disturbs natural rainwater irrigation, therefore it is important to aerate the lawn. This is especially true for highly trafficked lawns. If people walk or even run over a lawn, the pressure generates compaction in the soil. When aerating very dense soil, it will ease the process when the lawn is watered the night before aeration.

Types of aerator

There are two types of lawn aerators. There is the type that uses spikes to punch holes in the soil and there is the type that pulls out plugs of soil, also known as a core aerator due to the cores of soil removed. The latter is preferred if compaction is a problem, because while the spike punching lawn aerator only provides paths for air to contact the soil, the lawn aerator that pulls out soil also reduces compaction. For hobbyist lawn maintainers, there are also spiked shoes that can be used to aerate a lawn, these are much more affordable than larger lawn aerating machines. But these spikes, like the spike punching aerator, actually increase compaction by compressing the soil as the spike enters. This may be an acceptable result if aeration is the primary goal and compaction is not a problem.

Read more at Wikipedia.org