Core Aeration

The problem coring actually solves

Townsville soil is hardsetting sodic clay. Under foot traffic, mower weight and its own compaction it sets hard, and a hard soil does two things at once: it stops water getting in, and it stops roots getting down.

You can see it after a storm. The water sheets off to the low spots and puddles there instead of soaking in evenly. Two dry days later the lawn is stressed again, because almost none of that rain reached the root zone. Every bag of fertiliser you have put on has largely done the same thing — sat on a hard surface and washed off.

That is the actual reason a lawn goes backwards no matter what is put on top of it. It is not the grass. It is what the grass is sitting in.

What coring does about it

The machine pulls thousands of small plugs of soil out of the lawn and drops them on the surface. What is left is thousands of open channels straight down into the root zone.

Water goes in instead of running off. Air gets to the roots, which they need as much as water. Feed goes where the roots are rather than sitting on the surface. And the soil either side of each hole has somewhere to expand into, so the compaction eases rather than building year on year.

The plugs break down on their own within a couple of weeks and disappear back into the lawn. You do not need to rake them up, though you can if you would rather not look at them.

How deep, and why not deeper

We core to 75–100 mm and no further, and the reason is specific to here. The clay layer under a Townsville lawn starts at about 15–20 cm and it sits at a pH of roughly 8.5 to 9.6 — strongly alkaline.

Pull that up and spread it across the surface and you have made the problem worse, not better: you have just topdressed your lawn with the one material it needed to get away from. Deeper is not better. Deeper is damage.

It is safe on buffalo

This is the question we get most, and the answer is yes. Each pass disturbs somewhere between one and three per cent of the surface. The stolons bridge the holes within a couple of weeks, and 97 to 99 per cent of the mat is untouched throughout.

Coring is not scarifying. Scarifying cuts across the surface, which is what buffalo struggles with because every growing point is up there. Coring goes down through it and takes a plug out.

When to do it, and how often

We can run the machine any month of the year in Townsville. March to May is ideal — the lawn is still growing hard enough to close over quickly and the wet has softened the ground.

Outside that window it still works, you just want to water more than usual for the fortnight after and expect recovery to take a little longer.

Once a year suits most lawns. Heavy clay, heavy traffic, dogs or kids — twice. The Green Lawn Program does two a year for exactly that reason.

What it is like on the day

The machine pass is about fifteen minutes per 100 m². Add the walk-around, the measuring and the report and a typical front-and-back is a morning, not a day.

We need the lawn accessible and reasonably clear — pick up the dog toys and the hose. Damp soil cores better than bone dry, so if it has not rained, a good water the night before genuinely improves the result.

What it costs

The $199 Lawn Check is the way most people have it done: we core the lawn and hand you a written report on it before we leave. $199 up to 150 m², $299 to 300, $399 to 450, and bigger lawns are measured and priced on site.

$100 holds the booking and the rest is paid on the day, once we have measured. If the lawn comes in under the band you picked, you pay the smaller one.

And if you go on to the Green Lawn Program or a yard level within 60 days, the whole amount comes off it.