Aeration gets sold to everyone, every year, whether their lawn needs it or not. Here’s how to actually tell — three tests you can do in five minutes.
Test 1: the screwdriver
After a normal rain (not a drought, not a downpour), push a screwdriver into the lawn. Slides in with moderate pressure: your soil is fine. Requires real force or won’t go: compaction — aeration will help.
Test 2: the puddle watch
Watch the lawn during rain. Water pooling or sheeting off instead of soaking in means the surface is sealed. Compacted clay — common across Guelph — sheds water exactly like this, which also wastes every dollar you spend on fertilizer.
Test 3: the traffic map
Thin, hard-packed grass exactly where people and pets walk, with healthier turf elsewhere, is compaction drawn on your lawn like a map.
If you failed a test
Core aeration — pulling plugs, not spiking — is the fix, ideally in early fall, and it’s the perfect moment to overseed since seed falls into the open holes. Details on our aeration and overseeding page.
If you passed all three
Skip it this year and put the money into a September fertilizer application instead. An honest lawn company should be willing to tell you that — consider this us telling you.