How to Scarify a Lawn - The Complete Guide

how to scarify a loan for beginners and in this video I'm going to be going over what is scarification the benefits of scarification and I'm going to be using this Cobra 40 volt battery scarifier to do a live demonstration on the lawn behind me just before we get into the benefits of scarification this unit has been sent to me by Cobra to test and do a demo for you guys in this video it's got a fixed blade scarifier and this sort of power rake attachment as well and I'm going to be giving you a live demo of that in the next part of the video so first up what is scarification now scarification is a process of removing dead grass from the lawn but it's not only dead grass that gets removed it's also any debris that's sitting on the soil surface and also something called thatch now this debris and thatch builds up over time and what it can do is really choke your lawn out it can prevent water and the nutrients from your fertilizer from getting into that soil where you want it to go and overall along with lots of thatch is just not going to perform as well as a nice and open lawn that can freely access all the nutrients and water that comes available to it this is exceptionally useful if you're going to overseed your lawn one of the key benefits to scarification is being able to improve the seed to soil contact through your grass seeds if you think about it if you've got all this dead grass and debris sitting on that soil Zone when you put seeds down they're not going to be able to come into contact with the soil and that's going to reduce the levels of germination that you might find the second benefit even if you're not going to overseed is to improve the efficiency of fertilizers fertilizers work by getting nutrients into the soil they can be absorbed by the roots and then that allows the plants to grow if there's this sort of choking mat of dead grass and thatch over the lawn that's going to reduce the efficiency of the fertilizers that you use in and you're not going to get the best results that you're looking for you may think of a lawn like this that's nice and green that it doesn't need to be scarified or dethatched or actually you'll be surprised just how much material comes out of a lawn like this and I'm going to show you that in the next part of the video the third benefit to scarifying or dethatching is that it's going to make room for the healthy grass to regenerate and that's going to improve the overall density of the lawn and give it that full and thick appearance that we're all looking for a lot of people ask me what time is the best time of year to do scarification in the lawn now there's a lot of mixed advice going around about this but my preference is to scarify the lawn most heavily in the spring or the Autumn time and the reason for this is this is the time where the grass is most actively growing it's going to repair itself quicker and it also gives you an opportunity to do some over seeding now this particular garifier comes with this attachment which is a sort of spring time rate attachment but it also comes with a second attachment which is a fixed blade the scarifier is a bit more aggressive and it's going to really tear into that thatch and maybe just hit the top of the soil profile the rake isn't going to be quite as aggressive you can use this thing for example for maybe tidying the lawn up light raking throughout the season or even picking leaves up and things like that off the lawn and other types of debris but for scarification we want the fixed blade cartridge in there because that's going to tear rip out all that thatch that we don't want to be capped into the lawn so this is the lawn that we're going to scarify today in Fairly good health you can see it's still green but the color isn't really where we want it and it has struggled over the summer months coming into Autumn you can see if you look closely we've got some brown spots of grass and we're going to run the scarifier over it and we're going to put some fertilizer over it and that's going to help the lawn rebound and come back before the winter the first step of scarifying the lawn is going to be to cut it and that's going to allow the scarifying unit to do its job right into that thatch layer which is sitting beneath all of the tops of the grass blades [Music] and after you've cut the lawn like this things might not look great in color but this is all part of the process and sometimes you have to take one step back in order to take two steps forward so the next step is we're going to be using the scarifying unit itself this unit is a 40 volt battery powered scarifier from Cobra now I've already mentioned that it comes with these two attachments and the one that I've got in there today is the solidine scarifier blade on the top of the unit we've also got this height adjustment here now when we're scarifying the lawn I'm going to do two passes one in this direction and the other roughly about a 45 degree angle in the opposite direction foreign height most machines will have an adjustable height setting and you can see this one here just moving in and down as I'm using this dial [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] now many scary phone units come with this bag catcher on the back and what you'll tend to find especially if you haven't scarified your loan before or even if your lawn producing a lot of thatch these things are going to get full very very quickly I put this on just as a bit of a demo and you can see even just from a couple of passes on the highest setting the bags already completely full [Music] so you can see here this is the debris where ripping out the lawn and the scarifier itself is making these little trucks and these tracks are ideal for over seeding the seeds gonna just drop into there and you're gonna have a really nice sea to soil contact which is going to help your germination so I'm just going to break up some of that debris from the first pass and we're going to do another pass and we're going to go in a little bit more aggressively this time and really go to work on the thatch that's left in the lawn foreign just finished the second pass and you can see all this dead grass that's just been ripped out of the lawn I'm going to actually Chuck this away empty The Catcher And then change over to the um spring rake cartridge and I'm going to use this one just to tidy up some of the lawn now you can use a regular manual rig to do this or blow it off but when you've got one of these attachments it's really easy just to change it over on the machine and then this is just going to lift out any of the grass that we've removed and just give a better finish to the lawn before we move on to the next step which is fertilizing so the way to change the cartridge on these machines is obviously check the power's isolated um I'd actually recommend for safety reasons that you should probably remove the battery at this point or make sure your units unplugged from the wall so we're going to do that and that way there's no danger of it turning on [Music] and we can just load this second blade in foreign [Music] [Applause] 's done a fantastic job of ripping out all the debris from the lawn and I quite like how it's cleaned things up after I've finished the lawn is now ready for over seeding and feeding and I'm going to be doing that in the next video so if you'd like to see how this project turns out subscribe to my channel and click the follow button and that'll basically alert you to the next video where I start to overseed and feed this project just to give you a bit of an idea of what's happening there I'm going to use a seed starter fertilizer we're going to be over seeding any of the patches with the American dark green grass seed now this seed is a rye grass seed which means you can pretty much seed throughout most parts of the year right the way through an extended growing season and then as the grass starts to grow and I've done my first couple of coats I'm going to feed it with the phase release fertilizer dark green autumn thanks for watching it's Matt the garden lawn care guy and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Garden Lawncare Guy

Views: 97,767

Keywords: #lawncare, #scarify, #dethatch, #uk

Id: 34JVMmW6LFY

Length: 12min 20sec (740 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 07 2022