Early Spring Lawn Core Aeration and Overseeding

I suppose it is the season. Yes folks, it’s back. Spring in the Northeast. Well, I guess it’s Spring anywhere in the Northern hemisphere, but you know what I am talking about.

Springtime means getting your lawn back into shape. I know, I know…it looked so good when you put it to bed in the Autumn. It’s depressing what it turns into over just a few months. Actually, this Winter wasn’t all too bad for the lawn. Either it wasn’t severely cold or I am getting this lawn under control with some more organics and better grass.

I tackled a project that spanned yesterday and today. The project was to core aerate the entire lawn and give it a nice overseeding. Core aeration does wonders for your lawn. To read about the benefits of core aeration and to go over some frequently asked questions, you can check out this website. Since I already know how good aeration is for the grass involved, I just dove in to it. I have been doing this for a few years now and the grass is getting thicker and greener.

Okay, so like I talked about in my previous post, I bought some grass seed. The seed I got was Vigoro Tall Fescue grass seed blend and Pennington Smart Seed Fescue and Bluegrass grass seed mixture. I took a look at the backs of the bags before I purchased them and found the following types of grass seed:

Pennington Smart Seed Fescue and Bluegrass
- Justice Tall Fescue
- Greystone Tall Fescue
- Penn1901 Tall Fescue
- Monte Carlo Kentucky Bluegrass

Vigoro Tall Fescue
- Barvado Tall Fescue
- Barrera Tall Fescue
- Barlexas II RTF Tall Fescue
- Barlexas Tall Fescue
- Labarinth RTF Tall Fescue

I opened the bags and poured them both into a nice large plastic bin to mix them up. I thought I had enough to cover the entire lawn, but I was wrong. I had a total of 27lbs, but apparently that only gave me enough seed to cover the front part of the lawn. I had to go out again today to get more seed (which I will cover in the next post).

First, I started up the John Deere X300 and let her warm up. This was the first start of the season. Then, I ran back and grabbed the tow behind lawn aerator from under the deck. I hooked it up to the lawnmower and we were set. As you can see from the photos below, I used two 40lb sandbags as weight for the tow behind aerator. I used to use cement blocks, but they made a lot of noise bouncing around back there. I just wrapped these two sandbags up in an old sheet and things are much more quiet.

Once things were all set to go, I went ahead and aerated the entire front portion of the property. It rained the night before, so the soil was nice and soft. This is one of the reasons I like to do this in the Spring. Autumn sometimes offers hard, dry soil.

After I was finished aerating the lawn, I went ahead and spread the grass seed mixture over what I had just aerated. It’s a wonderful feeling seeing all those little seeds fall into the holes I just created. The holes give nice soil to seed contact.

Now, I just wait. It’s supposed to cool down and rain on and off for the next few days. Once it warms up again after that, I expect to see some seed germination.