It appears that every year, the next season is just starting a little bit earlier and earlier, doesn’t it? Just look at the shelves of your local retailer for signs of Santa… in August, for example. Pumpkin spice fills the air and every shelf before we’ve even taken our final beach trip for the summer.

While all this is true, we are entering the true late summer or early fall time of year. That means that it’s time to actually start enjoying that pumpkin spice you’ve held out for. And for autumn landscaping tasks – and there are few as crucial as aerating and overseeding your lawns.

Time to Understand Why Aeration is Important

It may be a term you’ve heard of before but not really understood what it meant. It may even be something your professional lawn care crew has done year after year, but you’ve been clueless as to what’s actually entailed in the process. Aeration is such an essential part of lawn maintenance that it’s time you understand what it is – and why it’s so important.

Aeration is simplified by taking small plugs of grass and soil all throughout your yard. What gets confusing is how this helps your yard thrive and grow. It’s about time you allow us to educate you.

Time to Partner Aeration with Overseeding

In many situations, aeration by itself isn’t necessarily enough to make the differences that these outstanding processes can create. When you complete the pathways throughout your soil to help water and nutrients reach the grass’s roots, making sure fresh grass is there to nourish is also crucial.

Overseeding as part of the aeration process ensures that the seeds can get to the most beneficial parts of the soil. After all, lawn care is all a matter of the right place and the right time.

Time for Every Season – or at Least Autumn

Like with many outdoor activities and chores, time of year makes a huge difference. We aren’t going to water ski in December, right? Of course not – nor should we wait till then to do our aerating and overseeding. With a frozen ground, the soil is not hospitable to welcome the seed, and the pathways created are a little too late by that point.

Nor would mid-summer work either. The lack of moisture and hot, dry weather makes growth difficult. Aerating and overseeding act kind of like some famous three little bears – not too hot, not too cold, and autumn is just right.

Time for Some Moisture

There are a few key things to induce life in this world – nutrition of some sort and water. Water is truly the stuff of life and something vital to the survival of every living thing. Some things can store water for long periods; some things need it every day (read: get yourself a cup of water as soon as you’re done reading).

When you aerate your lawn in the autumn months, you are giving your grass the best chance to develop a solid foundation for growth with your newly aerated and overseeded lawn.

Time to Hold Out on the Mowing

A very common occurrence is when your lawn is fresh, plugs of grass and soil lying about, new grass seed filling the holes left, to enthusiastically mow your lawn. Don’t. At least, not right away.

Speaking of time, you need to allow your small tiny grains of future grass to create roots and start to get strong; mowing too early could inhibit that process. Many factors can preclude when mowing should take place, and working with your team at EKG can help you figure out when.

Time to Feed the Masses

Water is the most important of the equation – but not the total of it. When you’ve aerated, and the highways through the soil are starting to come to life with fresh new buds of grass, water will help hydrate them to grow strong and well. Fertilizer will aid the water in allowing this to happen.

Fertilizing your lawn after you’ve aerated and spread grass seed is an excellent part of the process. Using the proper fertilizer for your type of lawn is essential but requires a bit of science that is best left to the pros.

Time to Weed Out the Weeds

You might be thinking: is there ever a BAD time to rid your landscape of pesky weeds? Weeds should be eradicated at every opportunity and gone at hard and tough, right? As much as we stand behind you in your desire to protect your lawn from these green encroachers when you’ve just aerated and overseeded may not be the time.

Fertilization of your lawn often requires particular chemicals that could inhibit the growth of the fresh grass seed that you’ve just overseeded your yard width. Fertilization of your yard also requires a specific set of circumstances best discussed with your experts in the green industry.

Time for the Right Equipment

While it may seem a simple enough process to aerate your lawn, it requires quite a dance of both techniques as well as equipment. Equipment, we can promise you don’t have lurking in the recesses of your garage.

Aeration equipment can be incredibly costly and, in some cases – or the wrong hands – can do more harm than good. Aeration is not just a process of poking a bunch of holes in your grass; the equipment used to create the plugs, as they’re called, is quite specific.

Time for the Crew with Heart

The most significant consideration when thinking about aerating and overseeding your lawn isn’t just the time of year to do it, the time of day to do it, or the time to do the other activities surrounding it. The team that you will use to do it is the number one priority when it comes to aerating your lawn and creating that lifeline to the heart of it.

EKG Lawn Services serves Midlothian, Mosely, and Chesterfield with the heart of experts and showpeople in customer experience. We are ready to put our hearts into your aeration, overseeding, and lawn care needs.