Dethatching might seem counterproductive; with all the tearing, ripping, and cutting, it feels like you’re butchering your perfect lawn!
However, doing these things and doing them well can actually really increase the quality of your lawn and get rid of any thatch buildup.
In this guide, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about how to dethatch your lawn. Before you know it, your lawn will be thriving and looking its absolute best.
What Is Lawn Thatch?
Thatch is an accumulation of living and dead grass shoots, stems, and roots that develops above the soil and beneath the green vegetation. It usually forms when the organic matter in the grass grows faster than it decomposes.
A small amount of thatch is actually beneficial for your lawn; it gives it some bounce, adds resilience against the elements, and insulates the soil and roots to protect it against very cold temperatures.
Regardless, excessive thatch buildup can cause a number of problems for your lawn, including:
- Too much humidity, which leads to disease
- Stunted root growth, causing a shallow root system
- Fungi and insects that can cause disease
- Slowing of air, water, and nutrient circulation
What Causes Thatch?
There are a number of reasons why your lawn might have excessive thatch. It could be a result of the following:
- Excessive water
- Dry soil
- Dead leaves
- Not mowing regularly
- Mowing your lawn too short.
- Pesticides
- Lateral shoot growth
- The type of grass in your lawn
Why Dethatching Is Beneficial
While a small amount of thatch is good for your lawn, too much thatch causes significant problems.
However, by dethatching your lawn, you will see an improvement in the quality of the grass and soil. Here are some of the benefits that dethatching your lawn has:
Allows Air And Water To Penetrate The Soil
To thrive properly, your grass needs access to enough water and air. It is a living thing that needs both air and water to develop. Thatch prevents air and water from entering the soil, which prevents proper grass growth.
In reality, your grass has very little chance of growing healthy if it has more than one inch of thatch.
Dethatching is the only way to see healthy green grass; therefore, if you love green grass and enjoy spending time outside appreciating nature’s beauty, you should definitely dethatch your lawn.
Improves The Soil Quality
Thatch obstructs the soil’s ability to receive essential nutrients, enough water, and fresh air. Your grass will still be able to grow, but it won’t be as healthy as it could be.
To enhance your lawn’s health and quality, dethatching is recommended. Dethatching assists in clearing your lawn’s surface of unwanted grass and plant matter.
Because of the direct sunlight, water, and air that can reach the soil after dethatching, your lawn will grow and the soil will remain healthy.
Allows Your Lawn To Receive Sufficient Nutrients
Thatch is merely a coating of plant materials that contains dead leaves, grass, and roots that are not necessary for your lawn’s health.
Some people think of them as compost materials, but it is actually decomposing plant matter that can deprive your grass of important nutrients.
Dethatching allows you to remove this matter from your lawn and open up the soil for nutrients.
Grass, like any other plant, needs access to the proper nutrients in order to thrive and preserve its beauty, so dethatching is important to guarantee the growth of your lawn.
Fertilizers Can Reach The Soil
If you fertilize a lawn that is thatched, the fertilizer is probably not going to get to the soil and serve its purpose. The only way to guarantee that the fertilizer you apply is effective is to dethatch your lawn.
Dethatching makes sure that the fertilizer is applied to the soil and spreads evenly throughout the area. Additionally, your roots’ overall health will improve significantly. If the roots are unhealthy, your lawn has no chance of growing.
How To Tell If Your Lawn Needs Dethatching
There are a few tests you can do with your lawn to tell if it needs dethatching. First, you should feel the lawn. If it’s spongy and bouncy under your feet, it’s likely that there is a thick layer of thatch underneath the turf.
This is also true if you have trouble wedging a finger through the grass; it means that your lawn definitely needs thinning.
You should also take a look at your lawn to determine whether or not it needs dethatching.
If you can’t see the soil between the turf crowns, you’re likely looking at a layer of thatch. Also, keep an eye out for dry spots, as this means that moisture isn’t able to penetrate through the thatch.
Finally, you can measure the thickness of the thatch to find out if your lawn needs dethatching. To do this, use a towel to remove a wedge of grass and soil around 3 inches thick, or pry up a small section of turf.
Inspect the thatch layer that lies directly on top of the soil. Your lawn requires dethatching if it is more than 12 inches thick.
The Best Time To Dethatch Your Lawn
Cool-season grasses should be dethatched in the late summer or early fall, whereas warm-season grasses should be done in the late spring or summer.
These times favor quick recuperation and coincide with their yearly development surges. After the dethatching, there will be three to four weeks of favorable weather for dethatching.
Choosing Your Dethatching Method
It’s worth noting that you can hire a professional to dethatch your lawn, saving you time and energy, especially when it comes to severe lawn thatch. Of course, this will come at a cost.
However, if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, there are a few DIY methods for dethatching your lawn.
Dethatching Manually
The most physically demanding kind of dethatching is manual dethatching. This kind of dethatching is done by using a rake with curved blades that digs into your lawn.
Invest in a dethatching rake from your local lawn and garden store if you plan to dethatch your lawn with a rake. For manual dethatching, there are certain rakes that work well when there isn’t a significant amount of thatch to remove.
While it is the most cost-effective way of detaching, if you find it hard to perform strenuous tasks, then manual dethatching probably isn’t the best method for you unless you have a small amount of ground to cover.
Using A Vertical Mower
Vertical mowers cut through thatch layers to penetrate the soil. Vertical mowers are ideal for lawns that require a lot of work and have a lot of thatch, as they are similar to power rakes but much more powerful.
Although these tools dig up the grass roots, you can control how much is extracted at once.
The most expensive method of dethatching your lawn is to rent or buy a vertical mower, which is available at most hardware stores.
Using A Power Rake
Similar to walk-behind lawn mowers, power rakes cut into the grass with rotating blades. To pull chunks up and loosen the thatch in your grass and bring it to the surface, these blades burrow into the thatch and penetrate all the way into the ground.
However, they are not appropriate for delicate or young grass. These power rakes work best for removing thin layers of thatch. Use this tactic only on thick grass that you aren’t afraid to cut.
The majority of people who use power rakes rent them from their neighborhood hardware store, but if you know you’ll be dethatching your grass frequently, you might want to buy one instead.
How To Dethatch Your Lawn
The dethatching process is pretty easy. Just follow these simple steps to get your lawn in much better shape.
- Mow your lawn 2 inches shorter than you usually would.
- If you’re using a dethatching rake, move it across your lawn, pulling it towards you to break up the thatch.
- If you’re using a power rake or vertical mower, turn on the power and move it across the entire lawn.
- Once you’ve dethatched your lawn, rake up any loose thatch and dead grass into a pile for composting.
- Add fertilizer and overseed with a blended sun and shade seed.
- Rake in the seed with the back of a leaf rake to evenly distribute the seed across your lawn.
- Top-dress your lawn with a ¼ inch of compost and rake it in with the back of a leak rake.
- Water your lawn daily and start mowing again when the new grass reaches about 3 inches high.
Doing this every 3 years will ensure that your lawn is free of excessive thatch and will improve the thickness of your grass and the quality of the soil.
When To Call In A Professional
Although dethatching a lawn is not a difficult task, it can take some time and be physically taxing, particularly if the thatch layer is quite thick and dethatching hasn’t been done in a while.
It can be more cost-effective to just employ someone to complete this task because lawn-care specialists have the tools necessary to complete it quickly.
This is especially true if you already use specialists to complete other seasonal lawn care tasks like core aeration.
They are more likely to avoid damaging the grass than a homeowner using a rental tool for the first time because they are experienced with operating powerful dethatching tools.
If your lawn is too big for you to comfortably maintain, hiring a professional might also be a smart choice.
Deep raking over a long weekend can be a taxing task, so hiring a professional dethatcher for a few hundred dollars might be a worthwhile expense for you.
Maintaining Your Lawn After Dethatching
After you’ve dethatched your lawn, you’ll have to spend some time maintaining it to get it back to its original state.
Dethatching will leave your lawn looking unhealthy with patchy spots and thinning grass, so you’ll want to overseed your lawn and add some quality fertilizer to get your lawn looking beautiful again.
These nutrients will help your lawn return to normal in time, as long as you continue to water and care for it.
You should also continue to look for signs of thatch in your lawn. As previously stated, dethatching your lawn every three years is likely to keep it healthy.
It’s also a good idea to test the pH of the soil to determine if your lawn is susceptible to excessive thatch buildup. A healthy soil pH usually falls between 5.8 and 7.2.
Besides adding lime to your lawn to restore the soil’s normal pH balance, you can also add ground limestone rock to keep it in check.
This rock is rich with calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate, which both work together to make the soil less acidic.
Preventing Lawn Thatch
Thatch buildup in your lawn happens when organic matter builds up more quickly than the older matter breaks down.
This means you should avoid anything that makes your grass grow too quickly, such as watering the grass more than necessary and adding fertilizer with a high nitrogen content.
You should also avoid using any unnecessary pesticides and only use them when you absolutely need to for a short period of time.
On the other hand, fertilizers can help prevent too much thatch buildup, but you should only add enough to maintain the lawn’s color and gradual growth.
It’s best to fertilize your lawn during the fall, as the grass stores carbohydrates more efficiently, meaning it can grow stronger roots.
A week after you fertilize your lawn, you should then aerate the soil so it can get good drainage and start growing into the aeration holes.
The Difference Between Core Aeration And Dethatching
Dethatching is a mechanical process that, as previously mentioned, aims to remove an abnormally thick layer of organic debris that hasn’t yet broken down into a form that can nourish the lawn.
This heavy coating must be removed in order for water and fertilizer to reach the roots.
On the other hand, core aeration involves removing several small turf plugs from the lawn together with their associated roots, leaving tiny cylinder holes through which air can reach the root layer.
Frequent core aeration can help to postpone the growth of thatch by supplying plenty of air and water down into the thatch, increasing the decomposition of organic material. However, this is not the same as dethatching; it is more of a preventative measure.
Your lawn benefits significantly from dethatching and core aeration. Depending on the state of your grass, either of these procedures, or both, may be required as part of your annual lawn care routine.
Due to the possibility of excessive dethatching harming delicate plant roots, some lawn care specialists feel that core aeration is a more beneficial procedure.
If your lawn has a thick layer of thatch, dethatching may be advantageous; if the layer is thin, as it is in many lawns, dethatching may be harmful to the lawn’s health.
On the other hand, regardless of whether the lawn is dethatched or not, core aeration should be done every few years, as it is almost always beneficial to a lawn.
If the grass is compacted, which is typical in family yards with a lot of foot traffic and sporting activities, core aeration is very advantageous.
Although there is manual equipment available, it is impractical and can only aerate one or two plugs at a time. Most of the time, either renting a motorized aerator or employing a lawn service would be used to accomplish good core aeration.
Final Thoughts
Although it may seem like something you don’t need to do, most homeowners find that lawn dethatching is essential.
Dethatching is something to consider if you care about having a lawn with lots of healthy grass that is free of disease and insects.
Dethatching is definitely something you can accomplish on your own, but if you’ve ignored your grass and the thatch layer is thicker than 2 inches, you might want to think about hiring an expert.
However you decide to dethatch your lawn, doing so will guarantee that it stays healthy and beautiful for years to come.