TOP DRESSING
Traditional Lawn-Care Is Top Dressing
At the heart of traditional lawn-care is top dressing. After a time, the essential nutrients found in the soil can deplete or dissipate leaving your grass starving.
Lawn top dressing is the process of adding a thin layer material to the surface of the lawn. This isn’t applied so thick that you’ll be able to see it, but top dressing is an organic way to adding some fresh ‘life’ back into your soil.
Benefits Of Top Dressing
A stressed lawn won’t grow as well and will be more vulnerable to drought, insects and weeds. Top dressing adds nutrients back into the soil.
Top dressing not only adds missing or depleted nutrients into the existing soil, it is living soil. Soil contains billions of microorganisms convert many organic materials such as fallen leaves, woody debris and other things into nutrients the plants can consume. These microorganisms, when missing, encourage a host of other problems that are difficult to cure.
Top dressing has a number of benefits:
Adds organic matter back into your lawn
Reintroduces microorganisms back into the soil
Combined with core aeration places new organic material and nutrients deeper into the soil
Can amend or modify the soil (adding compost can relieve compaction problems for instance)
Reduces the need for fertiliser
Can reduce the stress on your lawn from foot or vehicle traffic
Ensures any grass seed planted has contact with soil, needed to germinate
Helps soil retain moisture which is especially helpful when planting new grass or sod
Can even out dips or hollow spots in the yard so that grass has equal access to water
Can reduce thatch build up by encouraging decomposition
Protects the grass over winter
Unless Top Dressing is done correctly, it can also have a negative effect one of which is weeds. Any introduced soil will contain a lot of live weed seed, which will happily germinate on your lawn and develop a nice, new weed population.
The topdressing helps deal with thatch by covering and allows the grass to re-root and become denser.