Soil Issues and Information

Soil is the foundation of all plant health and plays an important role in how nutrients are available to the turf. It is recommended that you use at least 12 inches of soil for a healthy lawn. However, in most cases, when new homes are built, they have all the good organic soil scraped away and sold. They then come back and put two to three inches of topsoil down over hard compacted soil and lay the sod. This makes it difficult for new home lawns to develop good rooting systems, and they become thin and weed infested in a very short period.

Your Rockford Weed Man can help by offering services like fertilization and aeration. Fertilizers help keep the lawn healthy, which helps develop a thicker lawn, and as the grass plants decay they add valuable organic matter back into the soil. Aeration helps in breaking up the hard compacted soil, allowing nutrients to get to the roots, as well as air and water. All the products that Weed Man uses on the lawn are biodegradable; they all break down into carbon, hydrogen and trace amounts of chlorine.

Sometimes, lawns require top dressing in order to help put more organic matter into the soil. Often, just regular applications and aeration will help over time. Top dressing is done to help right away, and is best done after aeration, as the top dressing will fill the aeration cores. When top dressing, customers must ensure they do not completely cover the grass as it may smother and kill it. It is important that the soil be screened from any weed seeds, and make sure it is from a reliable source, as it can sometimes lead to other problems such as undesirable weed infestations.