What about you! Today we're going to be doing
a Video in lawn aeration - and as it even needed. I've been giving you the wrong information on
something, we're going to have to clear that up later. Let's go .......... How do you know your lawn
needs to be aerated? I'm going to talk about a few different things that can show you that your
lawn needs to be aerated. Now if you're looking at your lawn and it has a lot of moss in it, and it's
starting to have bare patches, well then that's a pretty good sign that it's suffering from
compaction and the roots can't get down in. If after heavy rainfall there's a lot of
puddles around your lawn, then those areas there, that's the places I would start where the
puddles are. Heavy clay soils, or garden with a lot of thatch, they're going to need to be aerated
more often just due to the nature of the soil. If your lawn sees a lot of use from kids playing,
or sports, or just general use are going to need to be aerated more often. Lately I've been getting
a lot of questions why aerating is even needed. To make that a bit easier I've come over to the
compost heap. Now compost or soil while it looks and it smells, it smells like a pile of muck,
there's actually billions of life forms in your soil. They say between 10 billion
and a trillion life forms in a bit of soil. And it's a really diverse ecosystem, it may have
viruses, it might have fungi, might have nematodes. Lots of microscopic bacteria life forms live
in healthy soil. They're all really important in helping break down the organic matter and
supporting the building blocks for your plants' growth. It's a jungle down here underneath your
lawn, and it's often easy to forget that your lawn's alive, and the more you can work with it the
better it'll be. Now I hear you say, "Robbie, this is all very interesting, but what''s all this got to
do with my lawn and aeration?". Whenever we improve the soil structure, then we're gonna increase
the pore spacing. Aeration can also improve the soil and help with your drainage. It's going to
prevent the risk of water logging, and that's going to make a more hospitable soil or environment
for the life forms that are in it. Now - let's go into the workshop and have a look at some of the
different tools that we can use to aerate our lawn. Welcome into the workshop. We're going to have a chat about
different types of aeration, the tools that you would use and when you would use them. So
number one, we're going to talk about this drill with the auger bit on it. Really
good if you have bad soil and you want to replace some of it drill this down into the
ground puts a lovely big hole into the ground and then you can fill that hole with whatever you
want, compost, sand, stones etc. The next tool that I'm going to say that you can use to aerate your
lawn, is the, is our old favorite, which is the fork. We've talked about the fork quite a lot in this
Channel. Some people will tell you that whenever you put the fork into the ground because you're
not removing any material you're compacting the hole on the way down. While that may be true, the
fork's very good, and it mimics something that the professional groundsmen do. They use a machine called
a verti drainer that goes down in the ground and it pivots and then it comes out. And what that
does, it creates fissures in the soil, that lets the water penetrate deep down in. The name of
the machine it's called a vertidrainer, a vertical drainer, so that's what we're going
to do with the fork, and that's what we're doing as well with the drill, but because you're going
deep down in. Places where I would use the fork first of all would be walk on and off areas of the
lawn, or places where you're getting a lot of puddles. The next tool I'm gonna to talk about are the shoes.
Now, if you go onto Amazon and you type in "aerator" these are going to be pretty high on the list. I
don't believe that these do a great job, because the spikes on them aren't deep enough, and they're
not thick enough, you're not really doing anything plus you risk the damage of hurting your ankles
walking about with these stupid things on. For aeration what I recommend is hollow core, for most
places I would hollow core. The benefit between hollow coring is, you're pulling out that little core.
The reason why we're hollow core is because we're removing thatch from the lawn, so we're helping
with compaction plus we're removing thatch. Now there's different tools you can use to aerate
your lawn. Again if you're looking on Amazon, chances are you're going to see a tool like this.
The downside to these tools is that there's no side core ejection, so whenever you
push this under the ground upside down whenever you push this into the ground the
core has to go from here to here and push out the top. This generally doesn't happen,
and as you can see these get blocked up. for aerating lawns, and if you want to do it manually,
I've reached out to a company called Garden Imports Limited. They Supply these aerators, I believe
these are the best aerators on the market for manual use. Some of the reasons why I like it, I'm
gonna now I'm going to leave an Affiliated Link down below. If you want to buy one off my Link
just to let you know it helps support the Channel. The reason I like these? They're stainless steel,
they're really really well made, you can take the cores off, you can take the hollow cores off, they
come with spare parts, and then put these on. So what's the difference between these and the
fork? I'm going to say probably not very much. The spikes are maybe for somebody that has a
Swordman lawnmower, Swordman aerator. You want all the Swordman gear you may as well have these
too. Before we go back down into the garden and do some aeration, what I would like to say is
it's more important that you do the aeration as opposed to how you do it with, if you don't have
any of the fancy tools to do it with you can do it with a fork or the drill or whatever you like.
More the fact that you do it than you don't do it first up we'll have our fork, pretty
simple put it in, give it a wiggle. We have these ankle breakers for the spikes that attach onto my feet under
my shoes. I'm only going to wear one, because the last time I had them on I nearly damaged
myself, so I just need to be careful with them. You can hardly see the holes that they make
at all. For me, these things here are useless. place where these belong, and I'll show you now, in the bin. As we talked about in the workshop, these are meant
to eject out the top, but they didn't, as you can see here there's no cores lying on the lawn. Next up we're
going to try the auger. This is really good if you want to change, if you want to put some compost
down into your soil. I'll show you that now. To show you with this stick how deep we went.
You could go deeper if you wanted. Now I would suggest if you were going to do this on different
areas, you would stick to smaller areas but if you had really bad soil here, you could put holes
all over your lawn and fill those with compost. You can see the difference, this tool here,
really hard to get into that one wee bit of ground, this one here went in really easily. It
also pulled out, it pulled out our lovely cores. This one here didn't pull out any cores and was
really hard work. If you have a larger lawn you'll probably want to, to go to a hire shop and
get the likes of this machine here, which is a a power aerator, much much faster for doing
larger areas, however it comes at a cost. I said at the start of the Video that I was
wrong with something. Now you can see the cores that have come out of this lawn. They
recommend that you leave the cores lying on top of the lawn for the bacteria, whenever
they start to break down you're going to help get the bacteria down into the soil. I'm
going to say, that comes with a caveat. If you have a very clay lawn and you're pulling
out little clay plugs, then you're probably wanting to clear them up afterwards . It's
going to come down to personal preference. So as you can see, we use
that machine to remove the cores off. I'm not a fan of leaving them on the lawn but if
you want to leave them on the lawn that's fine. Now if you've enjoyed this Video I think
you'll really enjoy this - so watch this next!
