Caring for plants can be hard work.
Each plant requires a different amount of sunlight; whether direct or indirect, water, and type of soil.
Each plant can be quite picky and needs aerated soil to survive.
How can you aerate soil?
Aerating soil means that you will be adding oxygen for your plants to absord. You can aerate soil by turning over the top layer of soil, aerating holes for oxygen to migrate into the ground, or by adding wetting agents that will provide oxygen absorption into the plants.
Why Does Soil Need to be Aerated
Common wisdom says plants need water and sunlight to grow, but they also need oxygen.
The only way they can take in oxygen is through their roots, which is not an easy task when there isn’t sufficient oxygen in the soil.
Soil also needs to be aerated to give the roots space for growth.
If soil is compacted too much, the root system of plants will have difficulty growing properly and won’t be able to take in nutrients as well as it should.
Sadly, without proper aeration, plants will die. Even if all other conditions are perfect, poor aeration will lead to an unfortunate outcome, whether you are growing crops for food or for decorative houseplants.
Causes Of Poor Soil Aeration
Now that you understand the reasons for aerating your soil, let’s discuss the things that will contribute to poor aeration so that you are accomplish to make adjustments accordingly.
The following items can create a compact soil with limited oxygen and high levels of carbon:
- Grazing fields: Allowing livestock to graze in a field is very beneficial to the fertility of the soil, but continuous grazing means constant walking. This compaction of the soil inhibits any oxygen getting into the soil. If grazing is a preferred management system, you can graze the fields but rotate the pastures being grazed.
- Machine Traffic: As with grazing livestock, heavy machine traffic will compact the soil. As a general rule, heavy machines should be limited to the area of soil you are producing from, while also avoiding wet soil.
- Soil moisture: Excess water from melting snow and rain, or even overwatering the soil, fill the spaces between soil molecules, hence pushing the oxygen out. When water is evaporated and the water creates space amongst the soil molecules, the oxygen will be able to penetrate the soil once again.
- Soil texture: The soil composition plays a role in aeration. If you are to use a soil blend that contains peat – it is going to have much looser soil than if you were working with a clay soil – thus result in more oxygen penetrating the soil.
4 Methods to Improve Soil Aeration
Understanding both the reason for your soil aeration and what causes poor soil aeration is important… but how do you fix the aeration in your soil?
Here are methods to improve aeration in a large field, or even in a small potted plant.
1. Tilling
Tilling is the least favored way we recommend aerating your soil!
You are turn it over with a shovel, broadfork, tiller or even a rake, breaking apart the compacted parts form the topsoil into smaller pieces while adding oxygen to the soil.
Tilling is massively fundamentally damaging, and it causes damaging effects to the soil!
Of course, it’s adding oxygen, and air spaces in the soil, but it’s self-destructive to the microorganisms living in the soil, it dislodges weedy seeds in the soil, and destroys your root systems.
Watch out: If you are using a gas tiller, you’re even polluting the air around the soil while aerating.
2. Spike Aeration
Spike aeration makes punctures in the ground for air to enter.
You can use these tools to aerate the soil:
- aeration shoes
- rollers
- mower attachments that have spikes on them
Aeration shoes are the most effective for small gardens or lawns.
If you have a larger lawn, a roller or mower attachment will work more effectively depending on the area you need to cover.
As a rule of thumb sandy soil is the best aeration technique.
In this type of soil, displacement when a hole is created won’t compact the soil because the particles are simply pushed together.
Spike aeration is not a good idea for soil with a large amount of clay, for that reason.
This is also the best method when aerating potted plants. Rather than a shoe, use something like a chopstick, or anything around that size, to poke holes in the dirt.
What to avoid: Be careful not to cause any root damage as that may cause more bad than good to the plant.
3. Core Aeration
Have you been on a football field and seen little hard cylinders laying on the surface that looks like… poop?
Good news! It’s not poop, it’s a little top plug of soil that just came out of the ground because of core aeration.
Unlike spike aeration which pierces the soil, core aeration is actually removing these plugs of soil to make room for oxygen.
Leaving the cores on the surface is a messy choice, but it does have some benefits. The excess nutrients and microorganisms alongside the soil plugs are not completely being removed from the area and can move back down deep into the ground healthy as they were.
As the cores breakdown, the become the new top layer of soil that the grass roots will grow through.
Oxygen can penetrate this layer even more as the grass, thatch, and roots continue to add organic matter to the soil and give the soil much needed space for oxygen.
Usually, core aeration is done on larger areas such as lawns or sports fields.
Did you know? Underneath the grass, the soil doesn’t necessarily need to be nutrient-rich for plants. It is often a dense, clay based soil which is the perfect soil for core aeration.
4. Liquid Aeration
Liquid aeration operates differently than other aeration techniques.
Instead of adding a means for oxygen to get through the soil better, a wetting agent is added to the soil.
A wetting agent will reduce surface tension for the soil and allow better translation of water through the soil profile.
While it may seem counterintuitive to want more water while you are trying to get more oxygen, this does allow for better soil aeration.
The addition of the wetting agent permits water to reach deeper into the profile and usually comes with needed nutrients for microorganisms to survive.
Even Better: These microorganisms will also be able to dig deeper for those nutrients. As the microorganisms, or worms, dig deeper, they are aerating the soil.
Final Thoughts
That’s all for now. Like I said, a condition your plants need to exist under, but is just as critical as sunlight and water.
Now, you have a good grasp on why your soil should be aerated, what’s the best way to aerate your soil, and if you haven’t followed my advice to this point, you probably should now!