I have a lawn service that controls my weeds, and does other things to my lawn to make it greener. However, I just hired them this year, after 60% of my lawn turned to weeds. They’ve got a lot of work ahead of them.
One of the recommendations that they made before starting was to rip out the old compacted grass and re-seed. I did one better, I ripped out the front yard to a depth of 9-10 inches, put in fresh dirt, compost, peat moss and grass seed. I did NOT roll the yard to make it all smooth.
They called last night and told me that their tech has determined that my yard is compacted (again), and needs to be aerated. They really couldn’t tell me how to determine if it is compacted, but I’m having difficulty believing that it could be less than 6 months after the refurbishment of the front yard.
How do I tell if they are scamming me for $$, or if this is a good thing that I’m an idiot for questioning? Should I just blithely hand over the cash to the experts? They’ve been pretty good to this point, so I’m inclined to trust them, but…
You should be able to easily push an average size screw driver down about 6 inches or more. Just a little resistance.
Chances are, with compost and fresh “dirt”, it shouldn’t be too compacted. Aeration is a temp fix anyway.
When you aerate, to fix compacted soil long term, you add in organic matter after the aeration and better soil (more sand/silt) But you added compost from the get-go, so you aren’t totally off.
It is possible to have compacted soil if the new ‘dirt’ you used was more clay than silt/sand topsoil. Search google on “lawn drainage” for techniques to find out how well the soil drains. Too slow = clay = compacted.
Clay soils are always compacted, even if new, so we must question the composition of the ‘dirt’ you put down.
When I re-did my front yard, I added 10% fresh black dirt, 30%compost, 30% peat moss and 30% old black dirt. I live in an area that has been built up since 1920, and the yard is somewhat clay-like.
I did find that the city offers a soil test for a nominal fee. I think I’ll have them come out and test the soil. That’s less than 1/3 of what the lawn service costs.
Thanks!
(Remember, when you preview your thread, to always check the SUBJECT line… Any spelling error will show up there.):smack:
I just explained: aerate and rake in top soil, compost and/or other organic matter. Sand can help and gypsum is a popular ‘clay buster’.
See, once the lawn has thousands of plugs pulled out (aka core aeration) you can take a spreader and pass over the lawn with gypsum and sand, and take some organic matter (compost is ‘black gold’) and add that in via tossing piles onto the lawn then raking those piles across the lawn. Of course, this is when you overseed, especially a tall fescue or ryegrass lawn, because these grasses don’t tiller out very well to reproduce like bluegrass, creeping red fescue or zoysia would.
