The lawn – part of the prototypical American Dream . Living in the suburbs, with a nice house with white picket fences, and a nice green sprawling lawn. If you’re living it but you don’t have the luxury of having a full-time gardener, then you would probably experience one or both of these things:

• Compacted and crusty soil
• Dry and frizzy grass

If you are, then you’re lawn probably needs to breathe. This means that the ground is too compacted. When it is, your lawn will be experiencing problems such as hampered air circulation and nutrient and sunlight absorption . Even your friendly nightcrawlers wouldn’t be able to do their natural job of loosening your soil. Hence, your turf will then exhibit symptom number 2. Too much compaction might even give you trouble with proper drainage.

Now this is when you need to aerate your soil. Aeration is the process of loosening up your soil so that all the things mentioned above will get reversed – the soil absorbs nutrients better, your turf will become lush and green, drainage improves…

A simple test whether your lawn really needs aeration is to stick a screw driver into the soil. If it slides in easy to the hilt, then you probably don’t need it.

Okay, so now on to the actual process of aeration. It really depends on the size of your lawn but aeration is usually done using a mechanical device called a lawn aerator (duh! :p). It’s a mechanical device that creates (around) 3-inch deep punctures into the soil – loosening it in the process. Some common hand-powered ones work like lawn mowers, only with spikes.

For smaller lawns, a hand spade or a rake might do the job – you just have to be careful not to ruin your turf. There are even aeration sandals/boots (really long spikes stuck to the soles) that you might want to try if your lawn doesn’t need to much aeration.

For tougher jobs there are fuel-powered and electric lawn aerators. For serious cases on large lawns you just might want to contact a professional to either rent you a commercial aerator or have them do it for you.

You might want to do this once a year. Summer or fall would be a nice time.