Just because everyone else is dethatching their lawn, should you?
I find dethatching service flyers on my front porch weekly during the summer months. The fact is, some lawns need it and others could be harmed by it.
Thatch is the buildup of grass roots and decaying grass blades.
It forms between the soil and the growing grass leaves.
Thatch in the right proportion forms an insulation and a natural mulch, and that's good for your lawn.
Leaving too much thatch in your lawn will interfere with it's ability to take up water and nutrients. Eventually, it will thin out and invite disease and insects.
If you walk on your lawn and it feels a bit "springy", it's a good bet you have a thick thatch layer.
Take a cut with a trowel or a spade into the turf and pull up a bit.
All that brown vegetation in the photo is thatch.
If you measure it to be 1/2 inch or more thick, then you should consider dethatching.
You can hire a landscaper to do the job for you. They will also haul away the much-more-than-you-thought dead grass you had hiding in your lawn.
Or, you can visit your local home improvement store or tool rental place and pick one up for 1/2 day.
These are somewhat heavy machines and the process will take about twice as long as it does to mow your lawn.
Don't freak out as you pass over your lawn and it's left looking brown and ugly. What you see is mostly the thatch that the machine pulls up to the surface.
Once you have gone over the whole lawn, now its time to bag up all that grass mulch.
It would make a nice brown addition to your compost pile.
Your lawn will be left looking a bit thin and sickly for a couple weeks but it should fill in nicely.
Dethatching should occur during your grass' growing season since the process stimulates growth.
That's spring and fall for your cool season lawn peeps and summer months for all you warm season growers.
If you do a dethatching during a period of dormancy, the grass will be stimulated to grow and that will hurt the overall health of your lawn.
To help keep the thatch buildup to a minimum, DON'T OVER FERTILIZE.
All that nitrogen in the chemical fertilizers most of us put down, stimulates growth of the leaf, greening up the lawn quickly.
Too much green too quickly and too often makes the lawn "top heavy" if you will. The roots don't have a chance to catch up to the growth of the leaf and that leads to thatch.
One application of fertilizer in the spring and another in the fall is plenty for any lawn.
While it may seem that a mulching lawn mower may contribute to thatch, indeed it is not so.
Those blades are so chopped up, they quickly decay.
