The Best Time to Aerate Your Lawn for Healthy Grass

Maintaining a lush green lawn involves a pretty extensive to-do list—from regular watering and reseeding to dethatching and fertilizing. But you probably haven’t thought much about aerating your lawn—or when you should aerate your lawn to achieve maximum lushness.

But lawn aeration can be a key tool in maintaining the health of your lawn—and doing it at the wrong time could actually weaken your lawn, according to Valerie Smith, lawn expert at Sod Solutions.

Here’s everything you need to know about lawn aeration—including the best time to do it.

What Is Lawn Aeration?

“Aeration, also known as core aeration, involves removing small soil plugs to reduce compaction and improve air, water, and nutrient flow to the roots,” Smith says. Generally, you use equipment with large metal spikes to punch holes into the ground, bringing up small cylinders of soil. Depending on how large your lawn is, you can opt for a manual aerator or rent or buy an electric aerator from your local home improvement store to make aerating large swaths of land easier.

The Best Time to Aerate Your Lawn

The short answer to this: It depends. “The best time to aerate your lawn depends on your grass type because the timing affects how well your grass recovers and benefits,” Smith says. “It’s important to aerate during the grass’s peak growing season so it can quickly recover from the disruption.”

The key is to know what type of grass seed you have, and pay attention to your local climate, as you want to do your aeration far enough away from when your grass becomes dormant.

Cool-season grasses

For cool-season grasses like bluegrass and fescue, aerate in early spring or fall when the weather is cooler.

Warm-season grasses

Warm-season grasses like bermuda, zoysia, and St. Augustine do best with aeration in late spring when they’re growing actively. 

How Often to Aerate Your Lawn

Depending on your lawn type and how it’s growing, aeration may need to be an annual or even semi-annual event, or you may be able to go for a few years without aerating your lawn. “For most, every few years is sufficient unless the lawn is heavily trafficked or has compacted clay soil,” Smith says. Look for signs that your soil is compacted, which means aeration may help. Some of the common indicators of compacted soil:

• You have clay soil
• The soil feels hard
• Your lawn is patchy
• Water pools on the lawn instead of soaking into the soil
• Your lawn gets a lot of wear and tear from kids and pets playing

Tips to Make Aerating Your Lawn Easier

Aerating your lawn may seem a little daunting—especially when you’re dealing with equipment that looks like it could do some damage. But with a few tips (and some heavy-duty shoes and gloves for protection), you can easily make this happen yourself.

Choose the right weather conditions for aerating your lawn

Even if you’re in the right season, you want to ensure that your soil is ready for the process. Aerate when the soil is moist (but not soggy), such as after a rain or watering. “Moist soil allows the aerator’s tines to penetrate deeper and extract proper soil plugs,” Smith says. Aerating dry, hard soil can create a lot more work for you—and be less beneficial for your lawn, too.

Go over each area of your yard multiple times

A single pass over your lawn won’t give you the results you want. Smith recommends making multiple, slightly overlapping passes, especially in areas that seem to be especially compacted. Once you make a complete pass in one direction, go over the area for a second perpendicular pass to ensure you really break up any compacted spots.

Don’t clear away the soil plugs

They may look a little strange on your lawn, but there’s no need to rake away the soil plugs. And in fact, leaving the soil plugs in place allows the nutrients in the soil plugs to break down and enrich the rest of the soil.