A vibrant, healthy lawn starts way beneath the surface. While regular mowing, watering and feeding all play an important role in keeping your grass green and lush, it's easy to overlook the health of the soil underneath.
Over time, soil can become compacted, or you may have clay soil, making it harder for water, air and essential nutrients to reach the grass roots. This can lead to a range of common lawn problems, including poor drainage, moss growth and thinning grass.
Fortunately, lawn aeration is a simple way to improve soil health and encourage stronger, healthier grass. Whether you're dealing with compacted or clay soil, or simply want to keep your lawn in great condition, there are ways you can aerate your lawn yourself and support its long-term health.
Common Problems With Lawns
People often experience problems with lawns once they are freshly laid, whether that’s in an already established garden, but particularly in new build gardens.
Moss: Moss often thrives in damp, shaded areas and can also indicate compacted soil or weak grass growth.
Weeds: Dandelions and clover compete with grass for space, light, water and nutrients.
Thatch: A layer of dead grass, roots and other organic material that can restrict water and air movement when it becomes too thick.
Poor drainage: Heavy clay soils and compacted ground can prevent water from draining freely, resulting in waterlogged areas and potentially damaging grass roots.
Aeration can help tackle several of these common lawn problems by improving soil structure and allowing water, air and nutrients to reach the roots more easily. However, some issues, such as excessive shade or severe drainage problems, may require additional treatment if aerating does not provide improvement.
What Is Aerating A Lawn?
Aerating your lawn involves poking small holes in the soil beneath your grass. These small holes will provide lots of benefits to your lawn:
Relieves compaction: Core aeration removes plugs of soil, helping to relieve compaction and improve soil structure.
Improves airflow: Creates channels that allow oxygen to move through the soil and reach grass roots.
Improves water penetration: Helps water reach the root zone rather than pooling on the surface.
Supports healthy roots: Better access to air, water and nutrients encourages stronger root development.
Helps manage thatch: Aeration can help improve the conditions for thatch decomposition, although it won't remove a thick thatch layer.
Helps discourage moss: Improving drainage and encouraging healthy grass growth can make conditions less favourable for moss.
How To Aerate Your Lawn
There are three common ways to aerate your lawn: core aeration, spike aeration and liquid aeration. Each has its own benefits depending on your soil type, the level of compaction and how much work you're prepared to do or the time you have.
Core Aeration
The most effective way to relieve severe soil compaction common in new build gardens or gardens with clay soils.
Core aeration involves using a machine or a manual tool that will remove small plugs (cores) of soil and grass when poked into the soil.
If you’re not keen on buying a machine, you can hire one or have a local garden care company come in and aerate for you.
If you want to aerate your lawn yourself with this method, you can use a hollow-tine fork. Pick one up from your local garden centre or hardware store if you don’t already have one.
Whichever method you choose, aim to penetrate the soil to a depth of around 8–10 cm where you are able to. Once you've finished, leave the extracted soil cores on the lawn to break down naturally, returning organic matter and vital nutrients to the soil.
Spike Aeration
The most common type of aeration to do yourself and most suitable for lightly compacted soils, surface-level maintenance or seeding preparation.
Please be aware: Spike aeration isn't always suitable for heavily compacted or clay-rich soils. Solid spikes can push soil sideways, potentially increasing compaction around the holes. For these conditions, core aeration is generally more effective.
Spike aeration is the process of using sold spikes to poke holes into the ground. The difference between spike and core aeration is that spike aeration does not remove any plugs from the soil.
You can buy or hire machines or tools liked spiked drums that you roll over the grass.
If you’re keen to do it yourself, you can buy spiked tools, or you may already have a spiked object in the garden shed you can use. Something like a bamboo cane, a pitchfork or a screwdriver can do the job, albeit perhaps taking a little longer.
For surface level aeration, you can buy (or make, if you’re particularly handy!) aerating sandals, so you’ll simply walk up and down your lawn. Or, if you have any sports players in the house, get them to run around wearing their football/rugby boots or golf shoes. Just be aware that this is a superficial method and not a replacement for proper aeration if that’s what your garden really needs.
If you're using a simple household tool, make sure the soil is moist but not waterlogged. Watering the lawn the day before can help soften dry, compacted ground and make it easier to create holes without damaging your tools.
Biological or Natural Methods of Aeration
While biological activity isn't a form of mechanical lawn aeration, encouraging healthy biological activity in your soil can naturally improve soil structure, drainage and the movement of air and water through the root zone.
Soil is a living environment containing a wide range of organisms, including bacteria, fungi, earthworms and other soil-dwelling invertebrates. These organisms help break down organic matter, cycle nutrients and contribute to the formation of healthy soil structure. As this biological activity increases, it can help create and maintain the natural pore spaces that allow air, water and nutrients to move through the soil.
Earthworms are particularly beneficial. As they burrow through the soil, they create small channels that can improve water infiltration and provide pathways for air to reach plant roots. Their activity also helps incorporate organic matter into the soil and contributes to nutrient cycling and soil aggregation.
In this sense, you can think of earthworms as nature's own aerators. Rather than physically removing plugs or making holes in the soil like mechanical aeration, they gradually create and maintain channels as they move through the root zone.
Encouraging earthworms and other beneficial soil organisms is therefore an important part of maintaining healthy soil. Adding organic matter where appropriate, avoiding unnecessary soil disturbance, maintaining suitable moisture levels and using lawn-care practices that support soil health can all help encourage biological activity naturally. Read our guide to The Benefits of Earthworms In Gardens to learn more about why worms are so important for your garden and how else you may be able to encourage them to your garden.
An easy way to improve soil activity for aeration is to use Active Lawn. Specially formulated with a unique blend of nutrients, Active Lawn works wonders by encouraging earthworms and enhancing biological activity in your soil. This natural process helps break down clay soil, improving drainage and aeration for a more robust root system. As a result, your lawn enjoys better water flow, which reduces the risk of moss growth that thrives in damp, cold conditions.
Simply sprinkle the required amount of granules on your lawn, following the recommendations on the packet, and leave it to do its thing. Because it's made entirely of natural ingredients, it will break down on its own with the moisture of the soil and grass. If it's a particularly dry spell and the soil isn't moist, you can speed the process up by giving the lawn a light water before hand, but it isn't necessary.
Active Lawn also contains a blend of essential nutrients to support healthy grass growth and encourages the natural breakdown of dead organic matter, helping to manage thatch build-up. By improving soil conditions and supporting beneficial soil life, it can also help create an environment where grass thrives and moss is less likely to take hold.
Made with natural ingredients, Active Lawn is a convenient and easy-to-use addition to your lawn care routine that is also safe for pets and children.
When To Aerate Your Lawn
Aerating your lawn is not something that needs to be done all year round. It’s a job best done during spring or autumn, whilst your grass is still actively growing and can recover. Avoid aerating in summer heatwaves or droughts, and winter frosts and waterlogged soil.
Soil should be slightly damp, so avoid excessively wet soil after heavy rainfall, or hard ground after a long dry spell. Ideally, you would aerate after light rain or, if you are in the middle of a dry spell, lightly water your lawn.
How Often You Should Aerate Your Lawn
If you’re happy with the conditions of your soil and are looking to maintain the lawn’s health, then aerating once a year in spring or autumn is plenty. If your turf is healthy and you don’t have any issues at all with surface water, moss or thatch, then you could get away with aerating every other year.
However, if you live in an area of clay soil (common for new build developments), or your garden has heavy footfall from children or pets, then you should consider aerating your lawn twice a year; once in spring and once in autumn.
Final Thoughts
Aerating your lawn is a simple but important step towards healthier grass, stronger roots and better soil. Whether you choose core aeration, spike aeration or a liquid treatment, improving the conditions beneath your lawn can make a noticeable difference to its overall health. Give your lawn the support it needs to thrive throughout the year.
