Lawn Care Guide: How and When to Core Your Lawn

If you’re new to gardening and lawn care, you may not have heard of ‘coring’ before, or understand how coring helps to keep lawns healthy. If you’re serious about growing a lush, healthy lawn, then coring is an essential step on your lawn maintenance checklist.

As the experts of garden and lawn care, at Jim’s Mowing, we know everything there is to know about coring, lawn aeration techniques, and everything it takes to ensure healthy grass year-round. Read on to find out what makes coring so beneficial for grass, and how and when to do it!

What is Lawn Coring and Why is it Important?

Lawn coring is a form of lawn aeration. This is when the soil is perforated to create small holes that allow for better drainage and improved flow of oxygen in the soil. By removing chunks of soil (also called plugs), coring helps nutrients and water penetrate the grass down to the roots more easily.

If you’ve recently had significant rainfall or flooding, lawn coring is an ideal way to help your lawn dry out and recover. It’s also a great means of relieving soil compaction, which can result in a patchy and unhealthy lawn.

We also highly recommend performing lawn coring after dethatching your lawn and before applying any topsoil or fertiliser, as it will ensure that your lawn can bounce back quicker and help encourage new growth.

 

How to Core Your Lawn

Now it’s time to get into the details of how to aerate your lawn by coring!

Gather your equipment for lawn coring

Before you get stuck into coring your lawn, here’s the equipment you will need:

• Lawnmower (electric or petrol) – learn how to choose the best lawn mower for your needs
• A specialised lawn coring machine
• Garden rake
• Fertiliser (optional, but recommended)
• Topsoil (optional)

1. Mow your lawn

To make sure you can see where exactly you’re coring and what you’re doing, you’ll need to mow your lawn a day, or a few hours at the very least, beforehand. As a good lawn mowing technique, mow your lawn a little shorter than you normally would, and remove any grass clippings left behind.

2. Check the soil

The day before you core your lawn, check the soil texture and quality. If your soil feels too dry, give the grass and soil a quick water. If left dry, the soil can be crumbly, and won’t let your coring machine properly penetrate the earth. On the other hand, you don’t want your soil to be too wet either! A soggy lawn won’t produce and hold the formation of the holes you need, and will leave you with a muddy mess.

3. Mark any obstacles

Just before you go over the lawn with your core machine, you will need to identify and mark any possible obstacles. This can include sprinklers, irrigation lines, unremovable rocks and anything else which may interfere with the core machine.

4. Begin coring

After you’ve carefully read through the instructions of your core machine and set the depth, it’s time to start coring. Simply manoeuvre the core machine around your lawn – it’s best to do this in differing directions, like starting with a horizontal pass then a vertical one.

5. Clean up any remaining cores

Following the lawn coring, you may see the leftover soil cores on the lawn. We recommend removing these, however if you do leave them, make sure to break them up so they don’t prevent the grass from accessing the sunlight it needs.

6. Apply optional topsoil and fertiliser

After you’ve finished coring, it’s the perfect time to give your lawn an extra boost by top dressing your lawn or applying some fertiliser. This is because the lawn aeration process opens your lawn up and enables it to absorb nutrients more easily.

 

 

The Best Time to Core Your Lawn

Now you know how to do it, but when is the best time of year to core your lawn? The optimal time to carry out aeration and coring is when the lawn is actively growing, so this will depend on the grass variety you have. If you have cool-season grass like Kentucky Blue Grass, it’s best to core in autumn and the beginning of winter (before the ground is affected by frost). If you have warm-season grass like Buffalo Grass, then we suggest coring as part of your spring lawn care. To give your lawn the best boost possible, we recommend coring it annually.

Have more questions about coring, or want expert help maintaining your lawn or yard? Get in touch with the helpful team at Jim’s Mowing today!