Scarifying Your Lawn is Easy With a Springy Garden Rake

Lawn scarification in the UK is done in Autumn or Spring, about every two to three years in a garden, to get rid of “thatch“.
Lawn thatch consists of living grass roots, the woodiest parts of dead grass, and usually moss, all piled in a layer covering the actual soil.

Thatch is spongy, and soaks up a lot of water without letting it reach the soil, but it can’t hold water like deep soil can, so it tends to make your lawn dry out in Summer.
Deep thatch prevents air circulating, harbours pests, and creates areas that get churned up if people walk on them in wet weather, then go bald in dry weather.

It is common to aerate the lawn at the same time: in general, lawns need scarifying more often than they need aerating.

• Scarify using a spring-tine rake. A normal garden rake with metal tines is not good, but plastic tines are fine
• Press down really hard and scratch the surface
• Rake the lawn one way, then again the other way, criss-cross fashion
• Tidy up the pile of old grass stems and moss, which can go on the compost or be used as mulch
• Don’t worry at all when the lawn looks sad after you’ve scarified it, it will bounce back in no time!

If you have a large lawn, you can get a mechanical scarifier (petrol, diesel or electric), which will get rid of it in one go.

TRANSCRIPT
Today we’re going to look at scarifying the lawn. We usually do this in the Autumn every two or three years, just to get rid of any old grass, any moss, if you’ve got a really wet boggy lawn, and give it a good rake.

Get yourself a springbok rake or a spring tine rake. That’s the best ones you use for it. Press down, really hard, and just scratch the surface.

That’s what you’ll end up with, which is all the old grass stems, all the kind of loose grass and moss, whatever’s in the lawn. Press down hard and keep on going criss-cross.

If you’ve got a huge lawn, what you can do, instead of going down with the rake, which will take you days, you either get a mechanical one, a petrol-driven one, or an electric scarifier which will get rid of all of this in one go. When you’ve got a pile of this, that’s for the compost heap.

Why not plant your spring-flowering bulbs at the same time as scarifying your lawn?