Address Winter Damage (Salt & Compaction)

especially if you live in areas that have high concentrations of snow. And if you also happen to have a yard that people tend to drive off the driveway and park in the yard in the wintertime, or areas where they pile snow up and leave it over the winter, you're going to experience soil compaction and soil contamination via higher concentrations of salt. There's two easy cures to this. The first thing you want to do is if you do have areas where they piled snow, you want to dilute the salt concentration that can build up. Easiest way to do that is a garden hose. Simply water the heck out of that area. That's going to disperse that salt and get rid of it. But, to decompact the soil, there's three ways to do this, two of which I'm going to recommend and one I'm going to tell you to stay away from. What I want you to stay away from to decompact your soil is dethatching. Dethatching loosens up the soil, but in the springtime, it's especially hard on the young grass that's trying to grow and pop down into that soil because dethatching tends to rip and tear through the roots. The best way to decompact your soil is with a process called aeration, and this is a machine that puts spikes into the ground, and then it vibrates, and it continues to roll along. This is hands-down the best decompaction method your lawn will absolutely love you if you can do aeration. If you don't have aeration available, you can use the old plug and pull method, which means you put spikes into the ground, you pull a core out, and you leave that core behind. Not as effective as aeration, but much better than dethatching. For areas where you have compacted soil, these two processes are what I recommend. core aeration, and really what you're doing is you're pulling portions of the ground out and leaving them on top. See, you yank this right out of the ground. Loosens up the soil, allows it to breathe. Here's a trick, something that I like to do after a hard winter where people have piled up snow and you get a little bit of sand accumulation and you don't want that, I use a power broom. Hey, how do you like that compared to a rake? Uh it's not even a comparison. Is it better? Way better. You can also use a rake. That's getting the thatch out, but that power broom did the same thing, didn't it? Yeah, it also got the rocks. Power broom's a little heavier, but this is still way more work. Yeah, I can tell. Just by watching you and listening to you talk while you're doing it. You would have just…