How Topdressing Improves Your Lawn Soil

Just like the human body, your lawn needs a certain amount of nutrients to function as intended. Unless restored, the essential nutrients found in your lawn soil will deplete over time, leaving the lawn struggling and malnourished. A lawn lacking nutrients won't grow like it should, and will be more susceptible to weeds, insects, and disease.

Thankfully, you can renourish your lawn in a number of different ways. Topdressing is a great way to rejuvenate tired grass and improve poor soil conditions, getting you on your way to much healthier turf.

What is Topdressing?

Generally speaking, topdressing is a sand or prepared soil mix which is thinly applied to the surface of the lawn. In our case, we use a 100% weed-free, organic compost which contains millions of beneficial microbes.

Topdressing adds valuable nutrients, organic matter, and micro-organisms to the lawn, which help it fight plant disease, break down undesireable thatch, improve heat and drought stress, and optimize seed germination and turf establishment.

Benefits of Topdressing

Since topdressing is conditioned to amend soils that lack nutrients, have poor structure, and are low in organic material, it can do a world of good for your lawn.

Some of the main benefits include;

• Adds organic matter and reintroduces microorganisms back to the soil
• Excellent for heat and drought stress conditions, since it acts as a mulch to help retain soil moisture
• Combined with seeding jobs, it helps ensure seed-to-soil contact and retains important moisture for quicker germination and establishment
• Combined with core aeration, allows nutrients to penetrate deeper into the soil
• Helps prevent turf disease
• Produces new soil through accelerated thatch decomposition

How And When To Apply Topdressing

When topdressing your lawn, it's important not to go overboard.

Too much topdressing can be very damaging to your grass and end up being an expensive mistake. Equally, you don't want to miss the mark completely with too little, as you won't get the benefits and will need to reapply. Rule of thumb is to aim for a thickness of ½" to ¾".

Topdressing can be done in Spring or Fall, when soil temperatures are cool. If you haven't already had an aeration this year, it would be worth having your lawn aerated prior to applying topdressing, as it will help remove unnecessary debris from the lawn and allow the topdressing to penetrate much deeper into the soil.

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