Dethatch your way to a Healthy lawn

Lawn thatch is made-up of many organic materials found in our yard that do not readily decompose. Small bits of sticks, grass, twigs, and other fibrous plant materials such as straw and leaf litter. Accumulate around the base of grass plants creating a barrier on the surface of our lawn’s soil, this thatch barrier serves to block the absorption of healthy nutrient, moisture and oxygen levels in the soil contributing to lawn diseases, molds, insect infestation and soil compaction stressing our lawn grasses causing the grass to turn yellow, brown or die all together.   

Still with me, cool, your grass thirsts for life sustaining nutrients and moisture, much the same as you thirst for information on creating a beautiful lawn.

Revealing how much lawn thatch is in our lawns is really quite simple. First, pull a plug of soil from the turf. This is much easier to accomplish when our lawns soil is moist. After a good soaking rain or deep watering is the best time. The next step is kind-a-like the ole cutting a small plug in a watermelon to see if it is ripe. Ok, you never cut a plug out of a watermelon to see if it was ripe. It works like this, make a series of cuts through your sod making a square or triangle shape, about two and a half inches deep and about the size of the palm of your hand. The goals hear is to pull a plug with the root structure of the grass intact. That way after we visually check the amount of thatch in our lawn, we can easily replace the plug back to where it came and the grass survive

We can use several garden or kitchen tools to remove a plug of soil from our lawn. You may even consider using a large butcher knife. Just make sure it is not your spouse’s favorite kitchen knife. We can also use a small garden spade or one of those lawn pluggers professional landscapers uses. You know the ones that they use to move plugs of grass from one location in the yard to another. Work great for pulling plugs from many different places in our yard making it easy to measure the thatch layer. Just remember to keep in mind. Different areas of the lawn will have more or less thatch.

Using a mulching mower under and around trees in fall mulching all the leaves will increase the amount of organic material that does not readily decompose. Discharging lawn clippings against a fence, storage shed, or the foundation of our home also contributes to the build-up of a damaging thatch layer. Subsequently it is highly likely certain spaces of your lawn will suffer the ill effects of a thatch barrier more so than other areas of our lawns.

Using this method to locate zones in your lawn with too much thatch, and dethatching only those problem areas. Will go a long way to improving the overall health of our lawns, while not causing harm stressing an otherwise healthy yard where dethatching is not needed. Oh by the way, in the event one of your nosy neighbors ask what you are doing, tell him or her you are looking for a buried treasure and ask them to help, that should be good for a laugh or two.

The truth of the matter, removing lawn thatch or dethatching a lawn as it were is a lot of back breaking work to be sure. However, the more effort you put into achieving your goal of having a beautiful lawn, your likelihood of success will increase exponentially. There is no guarantee, other than to say, it is a certainty that our dreams of a beautiful lawn will not come true without such efforts giving us opportunity to succeed.

Enjoy your lawn and gardens. teddletonmr