Repairing a Hard Lawn

Hard Lawns and Compacted Soils

Lawns and more correctly, the soils beneath them, can become hard over time due to a variety of reasons. These can include vehicles being driven over them, regular walkways or other normal human traffic, drought, or even lack of a proper maintenance and lawn care routine.

It can be expected that all lawns which are used regularly by people will eventually become compacted resulting in reduced lawn health.

Why Hard Soils Are Damaging To Lawns

Lawns require oxygen in their soil for their survival, a compacted lawn contains far less oxygen than the lawn requires for its health. Compacted soil also has problems soaking in, distributing, and retaining water. These are two key ingredients required for lawn health that are lost when soils become compacted, so the lawn will continue to struggle for life and deteriorate until the problem is rectified.

Lawn Aeration

The solution to a hard lawn requires aerating the soil, Lawn Coring is adequate for repair in most lawns. The process involves removing plugs of soil and turf from the entire lawn area. The process breaks up the hardness of soil, and allows instant access of oxygen, nutrients and water to the roots of the lawn.

More information can be found in our Lawn Coring Article.

Severe Problems

A severe problem of a hard lawn area may require an equally severe solution, however this is only necessary in a tiny minority of cases.

The solution is to use a powered Rotary Hoe to plough through the entire top of the soil to a depth of 10 - 20 centimetres. This will ultimately destroy the lawn in the process, but is sometimes the only solution.

After hoeing, the waste material is removed and the area is evened out again, and products such as a coarse grained sand or gypsum may be added to prevent the problem occurring in the future, which products to add is entirely dependant on what was the original cause of the problem in the first place, and what is required in the soil profile to prevent the same problems occurring again.

A new roll on lawn can then be laid on top of the renovated soil.