Your fall/spring lawn care should include several important elements, including aeration, overseeding, and composting.
In the fall, it’s important to ensure that your grass roots are healthy and growing, and that your grass has enough nutrients to withstand through a long – and possibly very cold – winter. Dream Greener offers double aeration, overseeding, and composting services to the southwestern Pennsylvania area.
Core Aeration and Over Seeding for Pittsburgh Lawns Proper lawn care includes:
- Double Aeration
- Overseeding
- Composting
Core aeration is often performed in the fall, but depending on your soil’s needs, can also be serviced in the spring. This process allows nutrients, water, and air to more easily reach the grass plant’s roots, and it breaks apart the thin layer of thatch (dead grass) that’s on your ground. Using a machine called an aerator, 2-3 inch plugs of soil are removed from your lawn and deposited on the ground, where they will gradually break apart.
Double aeration, which is passing over the ground with the aerator twice, in opposite directions, is preferred for Western Pennsylvania’s clay-based soil.
Core Aeration Benefits Core aeration:
- Loosens the soil. Our Western PA soil is rather hard and clay-based, often making the ground too compact for your grass roots to grow and obtain nutrients. Aeration plucks out plugs of soil, loosening the ground and allowing in food, water, and air.
- Enhances the root system. While your grass uses sunlight to produce its own food, it can’t absorb nutrients unless they come up through the roots. Aeration loosens the soil and provides a path for the nutrients obtained from fertilizer to reach the roots.
- Allow seeds to take root. If your lawn requires overseeding, aeration will give the seeds a safe place to grow with water and nutrients.
- Thin out the thatch. The thatch consists of parts of grass plants that sit on the ground, gradually forming a layer that can house insects and disease. We suggest core aeration be performed in the fall, in conjunction with overseeding, but it can also be done in the spring to prepare for the summer growing season.
Overseeding for Your Lawn
Overseeding is a service that replenishes your lawn with new grass seed. As grass plants grow older and have gone through seasons of wet, humid, cold, and dry weather – plus the usual foot traffic they endure – they eventually break down and need to be replaced. New seed is introduced after core aeration. It’s a careful mix of grass that is picked to endure different stresses that are common in the Pittsburgh region, such as drought, disease, and insects. Once this grass has reached maturity, it contributes to the overall health of the grass throughout the year by filling in areas that have thinned out, making the turf thicker, resisting weeds, and bringing better color to your lawn.
Fall is the best time to overseed your lawn. The cool weather, warm soil, and moisture in the ground all promote healthy root growth.
Composting
Dream Greener’s composting service enhances your grass. Composting is applying a layer of organic material to your lawn to improve the look and growth.
It helps by:
- Providing the proper nutrition for grass plants without using fertilizer.
- Holding moisture in, contributing to better root growth
- Loosening the soil to allow for improved root function
- Eliminating viruses and bacteria that may harm your grass
Dream Greener wants to save you backaches and headaches. Our core aeration, overseeding, and composting services ensures that your lawn looks lush and green. Our reliable, scheduled, multi-season service, performed by lawn care experts, increases the beauty and the value of your property.Call us at 412-835-1035 to find out how we can help your maintain your property in the fall, or at any time.
