Ugly, yellow-green waterlogged patches tend to appear where the roots of a lawn cannot breathe properly. This is the case where the soil is densified and also possibly waterlogged. The problem also occurs on heavily-used lawns. Special aeration measures – aerifying and sanding – for lawn roots permit the green grass to breathe again.
Aerifying
Lawn likes to grow on sufficiently sandy soil. If there is too little sand in the soil, for example in clay soils, or if it is too dense, for example in new house gardens due to compression through construction machines during the building phase, subsequent aerifying of the ground will help. “Aerifying” simply means to add air. Here holes are punched into the lawn soil, and these are then filled with coarse sand to prevent them silting up again. Surface water can now drain off better and the grass roots obtain more air – for better lawn growth. You can aerify lawns with the aid of a GARDENA Terraline™ digging fork in case of small lawn areas in house gardens or in problem areas (e.g. where the soil contains a lot of clay and/or is badly waterlogged).
To do this, stab your digging fork deep into the lawn in rows (row distance approx. 10 – 15 centimetres), loosen the soil slightly by levering the fork back and forth in the earth, and fill up the holes you have made with coarse sand. In house gardens, using this method on the smaller areas is certainly possible by hand with a bit of effort. For large areas, on the other hand, we recommend that the lawn is aerified by a landscape gardener who has the right equipment for the job. Please observe that aerifying is a surface soil treatment. Soil densification in the deeper soil layers is not remedied in this way, but at most concealed. In such cases, deeper lawn soil loosening by a landscape gardener is required, and the lawn will have to be re-sown.
Sanding
Sanding of the lawn, which is used to revitalise worn lawn areas, is even more of a surface treatment. Sanding improves the permeability of the topsoil for water and oxygen. Precisely now, at the beginning of the year, the soil can heat up better and the lawn can therefore grow better after sanding. This is how it’s done: Dethatch the lawn thoroughly. Immediately afterwards, scatter coarse quartz sand evenly across the entire lawn surface to approx. 1 cm (grain (0/2). Therefore, you need 100 litres of quartz sand per ten square metres of lawn, and for 100 square metres you need one cubic metre of sand.
