Aerating your lawn is an important part of maintaining a healthy and lush yard. Aeration helps promote healthy root growth and encourages the grass to grow evenly. It also helps reduce the compaction of your yard’s soil. This compaction can lead to problems like poor drainage or nutrient deficiencies in the grass.
Additionally, aerating your lawn can reduce thatch buildup. Thatch is the layer of dead grass that accumulates on top of a lawn during the winter. Thatch can prevent new grass from growing properly. Regular aeration will help keep your lawn looking green and healthy for years to come.
Continue reading to learn all about spring lawn aeration and how our friendly team at Peninsular Pest Control can help!
The Importance of Lawn Aeration
Lawn aeration is a crucial part of lawn maintenance. It helps promote healthy grass growth and increases the overall vitality of your lawn. Lawn aeration involves poking small holes throughout your lawn, which allows oxygen, water, and fertilizer to reach deeper roots. This process also reduces soil compaction, allowing your lawn’s roots to spread out more efficiently and absorb nutrients more quickly.
Reducing soil compaction also creates a more suitable environment for beneficial organisms. Earthworms and fungi that help break down organic matter into nutrients for plants. Furthermore, regular aeration can reduce the risk of certain diseases and brown patches, improving drainage throughout the lawn.
Aeration can either be accomplished via DIY means or handled professionally with motorized tools. The aeration process involves removing small plugs of soil from your lawn. This allows the lawn’s soil to absorb more air, water, and nutrients. This is especially beneficial for areas of your lawn that are compacted due to foot traffic or heavy tree roots.
It’s important to remember that aeration every spring will help keep your grass looking its best!
Preventing Compacted Soil
Aerating your lawn can help you prevent and remove compacted soil in several ways. Firstly, aeration creates a more consistent layer of soil, which leads to better drainage and more efficient absorption of nutrients. Aeration also allows air to reach the root zone more efficiently. Air is essential for healthy grass growth and helps your lawn’s roots penetrate deeper into the soil and absorb more water and nutrients.
In addition, aeration helps reduce surface compaction by breaking up clumps of soil. This process allows for better water infiltration into the ground. Aerating your lawn regularly, you can ensure your grass has adequate access to all the oxygen and nutrients it needs. The result is a better-looking lawn that’s more resilient against diseases and pests.
Quality Spring Lawn Aeration
Peninsular Pest Control is here to help with all of your springtime lawn aeration needs! Our friendly team of professionals is knowledgeable and experienced in both residential and commercial properties pest control. We will work closely with you to ensure that your lawn is properly aerated. This will keep it looking beautiful all season long. Get in touch with us today for a free estimate!
How do you know whether your lawn is being damaged by mole crickets or chinch bugs? It’s actually easy to test for both.
Chinch Bug test
To test your lawn for chinch bugs, simply rake your fingers across the dead grass onto a white paper (or your driveway) and you will see them, if they are present.
These bugs naturally exist in our environment and there are some natural diseases that will keep them at bay. They prefer the moist grass but when the grass dries out, these natural diseases go away and the chinch bug population spikes.
If you don’t see any chinch bugs, it’s easy to do a soap flush test for Mole Crickets.
Mole Cricket test
Just mix 1.5 ounces of liquid dishwashing soap. like Dawn, into 2 gallons of water and sprinkle the mixture over 4 square feet of turf. If two to four crickets appear within three minutes of application, corrective action is justified.
Here’s a quick video to show you how to do it:
Once you have determined what type of insect has invaded your lawn, it’s important to begin treatment immediately. Both insects require a liquid application of insecticide which is applied evenly and thoroughly across the lawn. Mole Crickets require a larger volume of material than the chinch bug but both are treated virtually the same.
Hiring a professional pest control company like Peninsular is usually preferred due to the large amount of product needed, not to mention the time it takes to thoroughly treat the lawn.
Lawn damaging caterpillars have already been spotted this year in large numbers. We have received many more calls about Sod Webworm Damage this year than in seasons past. You may notice small moths, which are uncontrollable, flying in your lawn. These Migratory Moths randomly lay eggs, producing caterpillars. The sod webworm damage from these caterpillars make the lawn appear like it was mowed too short. It is important to note that damage from these insects will generally recover within 2 -3 weeks during the growing season. Also, please understand the adult moths itself does not eat the grass, and when in numbers are just a simple nuisance.
Sod webworm larvae or caterpillars are grayish tan with brown heads. They have tiny dark spots on their body. They reach 3/4 to 1 inch when fully grown. Sod webworms hibernate in the thatch and soil as partially developed larvae. According to The University of Florida IFAS/Extension, these worms reside in silk lined tunnels in the thatch and soil. Larval activity usually resumes in April or early May.
Tropical sod webworm larvae are destructive pests of warm season turfgrasses in our area. The first sign of sod webworm damage is often caused by differences in grass height in areas where larvae are feeding.
The sod webworm damage usually occurs at night when the worms feed, their counterpart, the army worm feeds during the day and are a little larger than the sod webworm.
You can find sod webworms by parting the grass and looking for a small C-shaped worm curled up in a green pile of their excrement at the thatch level. What you will have found is the larval stage of the sod webworm moth. It’s the larval stage that will crawl through the grass and chew the blades down to the root zone.
Treatment requires two treatments in order to break the life cycle of the insect. As the eggs hatch out, that next cycle of worms will need to be treated. The reason it’s best to call a professional exterminator is due to the volume of material that is needed to control the sod webworms.
The Peninsular technician will inspect the lawn to determine where the sod webworm has started to eat the lawn. This is usually a brown color that is shorter than the rest of the lawn, almost as if a weed eater has attacked that area of the lawn.
During the application we start at the far corner of the lawn and treat in a back and forth pattern almost as if we are mowing. This will thoroughly treat the entire lawn with insecticide.
