Aerating your lawn grass is necessary to get good and healthy growth of the grass. Lawn aerators are basically equipments that can help you aerate your lawn to encourage plush growth of the grass by enabling the roots to take in more air and sunlight.

The process of aeration involves coring or making holes in the lawn extracting small amounts or plugs of soil in the process. The advantages of this procedure include good supply of oxygen into the roots of the grass and allowing the soil to breathe freely. It also helps the nutrients and fertilizers to reach the depths of the soil making it available to the roots directly. When you do not aerate your lawn, only half the quantity of fertilizers reach the roots and the rest are lost on the surface itself. The other benefit of aeration is that the soil gets loosened up taking in more water and the process also helps to break up the thatch.

There are both manual and power lawn aerators which can be used to aerate or core the soil of your lawn.

The manual lawn aerators will have spikes or hollow cylinders which is used to core and remove plugs of soil. This equipment will keep you on your feet while you push it around the lawn which is quite useful as an exercise too. Manual aerators are quite good for the process and also cheap when compared to power ones but these can be quite labor intensive especially when you have a large lawn or require to aerate a park or stadium.

Power lawn aerators are expensive and hence are rented for household purposes. These commercial machines both have spikes or cores for aerating the lawn and are quite easy to use. The coring version of the equipment is most effective and is ideal for large lawns, fields and parks. If you have inbuilt sprinklers on the ground, take care while using aerators especially the power ones as they are tear through and destroy the sprinklers.

It is best to aerate your lawn twice a year though you can do it three to four times if you are doing it for the first time and the soil is quite rigid and compact. Spring, late summer or fall are the best times to do this process; if you live in an arid climate, twice a year aeration is a must whereas in wet areas, once a year is more than sufficient. It is also necessary to water your lawn well the previous day of aeration so that the soil is soft and easy to core. But make sure that you do not pour too much water and make it muddy which makes it difficult to aerate and is ineffective.

Once you have aerated the lawn, you can leave the soil plugs on the grass itself and then plug them back later. The plugs will also break up on their own which will be effective for the breakdown of the thatch.