Benefits of Top Dressing Lawns with Sand or Topsoil Mix & Core Aeration in Morrisville, VT

Wanting the perfect lawn requires a series of maintenance and treatments; frequent mowing (but not too short), scheduled watering, quarterly fertilizing, proper drainage, and seeding if necessary. But to get your turf strong, green, lush, and soft there is more you can do to contribute in ways of treatments. Today, we at Matt Myette Landscaping would like expound on lawn top dressing and the benefits it has to offer.

Benefits of Lawn Top Dressing

Unless you are already familiar with top dressing, you may not know the use or advantages it offers. Methodically applied to the surface of the lawn, the top dressing is a sand or pre-treated soil mix that protects early developing plants as they get established, and to help avoid winter desiccation. A thin layer, generally ¼ inch or less, of top dressing materials are evenly applied to smooth the surface of the lawn and reduce thatch buildup by supporting decomposition. Top dressing is ideally applied on top of other treatments like seeding, over-seeding, or sprigging. To help speed up the turf recovery, the top dressing material filters into the holes opened during the aeration process. When obtaining the top dressing, the composition of the soil used in the top dressing should closely resemble that of the soil sprouting your grass to achieve maximum results.

Top Dressing & Core Aeration of Lawns

However, if you are looking to modify your soil profile, top dressing treatment is an optimal solution, and over the course of several years, you can reach your goals. The top dressing soil composition can differ from the composition of the current soil if you don’t want to transform the soil, but it shouldn’t be significantly different. Top dressing is often used in conjunction with core aeration, with a coarse-textured material, being often either sand or sand-organic mixtures, are applied to high clay content, which are fine-textured soils. Air and nutrient movement into the soil is the goal that is accomplished with the use of top dressing by alleviating compaction problems and optimizes watering.

Top Dressing Mistakes to Avoid

The top dressing for soil modification can have negative impacts instead of beneficial gain if not performed efficiently. The same material determined for ideal top dressing materials must be consistently used throughout the entire process to maintain adequate water movement and encourage root growth. The most common mistake that produces inefficiency is using a fine-textured soil forming a layer on top of a coarse-textured soil. The water’s ability to reach the turf-grass’ roots is hindered due to the fact that the water moves throughout the top layer of soil texture before it absorbs into the bottom layer. Uneven depths of material across the lawn will emerge and additional issues will occur if the process of applying the top dressing is done poorly or inadequately. Water and nutrients will avert accessibility creating wet and dry areas in the turf; impacting growth and the overall appearance. Excessive volumes of top dressing material, as well as too frequent applications can bury the existing thatch layer; resulting in making the turf more susceptible to drought, heat and other such stresses if the soils is without proper aeration, which will can potentially cause the roots grow into and within the thatch layer rather than extending into the soil profile.

Top Dressing Lawn Services & More in Greater Morrisville, Stowe & Lamoille County, Vermont

If you believe top dressing is right for your lawn, contact Matt Myette Landscaping and let our trained professionals consult and execute the top dressing treatments.

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