It's time to core your lawn

With Spring on our doorstep, it's a perfect time to start preparing your lawn for the growing season and one of the best ways you can do this is by coring.

Over the next few weeks,  ground temperatures will begin to rise, which is exactly the cue lawns like Kikuyu, Couch and Buffalo are looking for to begin their wake-up process out of Winter dormancy.

Now is the ideal time to core your lawn while your soil is soft from Winter rains.  I’m fairly sure that most people who own a lawn have some idea what lawn coring is, and while it’s been around for ages as a process to maintain your lawn, in our experience, it’s something most people don’t consider as part of their maintenance schedule which is interesting because there are a lot of compelling reasons to do it.

Lawn coring, sometimes called aeration, is where small cores are removed from the lawn, typically up to 20mm wide and 100mm deep. A core is generally removed about every 150mm across the surface of the lawn. As you can imagine, 1000’s of these cores are removed, which need to be raked up and put in the bin.

You may be surprised to know that lawn coring is a hugely beneficial thing to do for your lawn. There are many advantages, including the following:

• Coring introduces oxygen back into the soil, which is essential for lawn health.
• Coring removes a significant amount of root thatch from the lawn, which, together with the extra oxygen and free soil space, allows the lawn to reach down further into the soil profile leading to a healthier, more resilient and even more drought-tolerant lawn.
• Coring improves water flow through the soil profile, which does a couple of things. It can alleviate waterlogging and lead to a deeper root zone because more water and nutrients are available deeper in the soil.
• Coring alleviates compacted soils.

Coring can be undertaken to fix a problem such as waterlogged or compacted soils, but it can also be done as a matter of maintenance on a yearly basis to improve overall lawn health and to reduce water and nutrient requirements during the warm months.

While you can core at any time during the year, August and September are two of the best months. The increasing daytime temperatures will mean your lawn will be showing signs of coming out of Winter dormancy, and the Winter rains will mean the soil will still be quite soft, allowing the core tines to go deeper into the soil.

Coring is not a complicated process and can be done using a motorised coring machine or a hand corer. Coring machines can be hired from most hire shops if you want to tackle the project yourself, or you may want to employ the services of a contractor to do it for you. Contractors generally use a much heavier machine than the type you would hire, and because of that, the coring tines go much deeper and therefore do a better job.

If you want to have a hand corer as part of your maintenance kit, check out these new Australian made units. Called, "The Multi" corer, they are designed to last a lifetime and are perfect for use around smaller lawns or where you don't want to hire a motorised corer. They are available with a range of different types of tines (made by Turf Tine). You can interchange the tines from solid to hollow types, depending on the soil type you are working on. 

Would I recommend coring as a form of preventative maintenance? – absolutely. It will definitely pay dividends in keeping your lawn in tip-top shape.