Lawn Care - Dethatching Your Lawn

Thatch Removal or De-thatching.

If your lawn feels spongy under foot, the chances are its got a build-up of thatch, particularly with Buffalo, Couch and Kikuyu lawns. ‘Thatch’ is the layer of dead grass that lies above the soil and root system - it can stop air and moisture reaching the roots and encourages fungal disease.

To remove, hire a de-thatcher or scarifier from an equipment hire outlet such as Kennards Hire in Australia. These tools cut through and remove unwanted material (but aren’t recommended on buffalo grass lawns). For smaller areas, use a metal-tined rake to remove the excess thatch and avoid over fertilising as this can cause thatch build-up.

Over time, all lawns build up a layer of dead grass, or thatch, at their base. Here are two steps you can take:

‘Core’ your soil

Walking, playing or parking your car on the lawn can cause the soil to become compacted. Water then can’t soak through, and air can’tcirculate - it’s particularly a problem with clay-based soils;

To de-compact the lawn, hire a corer or hollow tine machine or, for small areas, use a large garden fork and work your way across the lawn. Mechanical corers have hollow prongs that extract plugs of soil, leaving long holes called cores. When dry, use a lawn leveler to rake the crumbled cores back into the lawn. Alternatively fill the holes with sand or sandy loam.

Vertical mowers for large areas

The aggressive growth of turfgrasses such as bermudagrass, Kentucky bluegrass, zoysiagrass and creeping bentgrass leads to the production of a heavy thatch layer. Periodic vertical mowing helps keep thatch from becoming too thick.

Vertical mowing, or verticutting, describes using a machine equipped with blades that reach vertically into the turf canopy to cut through lateral stems and dislodge thatch. You can adjust the blade height of most units to control how deeply you cut into the turf and how much thatch you remove.

The shape and length of the blades, and the spacing between them, vary depending on the type of unit and its manufacturer. A vertical mower is a machine with solid-mounted blades on an axle. Dethatchers or power rakes, by contrast, have blades or wire tines connected to the axle with springs or as flails to allow some movement in response to striking a hard object. However, both are frequently used to dethatch turf.

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