Aerator for lawn mowers

Aerator for lawn mowers
Tips and Guide

An aerator is crucially important for a beautiful and healthy lawn, yet not many people know how to go about buying just the right one for their lawns.

Read on, for lots of tips on how to buy just the right aerator for lawn mowers, and a guide to how to obtain the best quality device at the best possible price.

There are two types of aerators on the markets, the spike type and the core-removing type.

The Spike Aerators

The spike ones are just about useless unless your lawn is both small and has a low clay content. However, if your lawn does have a low clay content, these things could work for you.

There are two kinds, one that work by a roller, and ones that work by foot pressure.

The roller ones don't have too much penetrating power, but can work on a low clay lawn.

The foot pressure ones work reasonably well, but are extremely tedious to use, and can only service very limited areas.

You can go in for the spike aerators if your lawn meets the above conditions, but to truly aerate any kind of soil, you should avoid just about any aerator that doesn't actually remove a core of soil.

It's a very bad policy to go in for aerators that use spikes to make holes in the ground – these hardly do any good at all, and if anything they just make the soil more compressed. But an aerator that pulls up a core of soil not only opens up a genuine pocket of air, but also loosens and re-distributes the soil.

Roller Spike Aerators

Foot Pressure Spike Aerators

The Core Aerators

If you use a punch-core device, you can then greatly improve the health of your lawn by filling those holes with some light compost, vastly increasing the fertility of the soil under your lawn, and thereby equally enhancing the health of your grass.

Now there are mechanical and manual core aerators available. The manual core aerators are again just as tedious to use as the foot spike devices, but they work extremely well on any kind of soil. They are also cheap, so by all means go in for one of these if you only have to aerate small areas at a time.

Manual Core Aerators

Mechanical Core Aerators

Aerator for lawn mowers - The Buying Guide

It might be useful to note that whether or not you buy and keep and aerator greatly depends on the size of your lawns.

An aerator is definitely not recommended for even a medium size home lawn, because it simply costs far too much to purchase and to maintain, and is hardly worth that price when it's only going to be used once in a year, or at the most, twice.

Those with small and medium lawns can sometimes rent an aerator from a company that deals in such things, but usually what you'll have to do to get your lawn aerated is to approach a landscaping company.

However, if you have extensive lawns, or if you're the owner of a professional landscaping company, then purchasing an aerator not only makes sense, but is an imperative need.

For the small lawn owners, the manual core aerators work best, and for a professional company, there are commercial devices that weigh more than two hundred pounds and are powerful enough to service a lawn of any kind or size.