Compacted Soil Lawn Problems

Mary Gonzales:

Hey everybody, it’s Mary with Nelson Nursery and Water Gardens and let’s talk about compacted soil and lawns. If you take a look down here, I can tell that this lawn is struggling. I have got taproot weeds here. You can see that it’s just not thriving. And one of the reasons is because this is a well-used lawn, it’s walked over a lot, so I need to fix the compaction. And the first step to doing that is by using Humates Plus, which is a concentrated compost. What that will do is there are little microorganisms in your soil, just think of them as tiny earthworms. And they are going to get in there, this is going to help feed them and help break that soil up and add more oxygen and everything into your soil, helping the soil, which then helps your grass. After we’ve done that, there are a couple of things we can do to help make it look better faster.

So the first thing we can do is re-sod. You can use plugs or pieces of sod. I can simply take this weed out and plop in this beautiful piece of sod here. It’s going to spread out and grow into the existing lawn. And after about a few weeks, I would say about two to three weeks, we can follow up with a fertilizer like this year-round TurfStar Bruce’s Brew. This guy is going to be a slow release feed, putting in grape fertilizer to help brighten up that grass, get you that good nitrogen and everything, get you a nice green lawn.

Another issue you might see with compaction is if there’s a lot of standing water. And that happens after floods, you have a break in your line. And what we can do is that washes out all trace minerals and nutrients. So there’s a great product that is all about trace minerals called Azomite. And that will put all those micronutrients back into the soil with the trace minerals. And again, help solve your problem of compaction, which in the long run is going to get you deeper roots with your grass, which means less watering and a wonderful lush green lawn.