Top Dressing Your Lawn

Every lawn has a unique soil composition and each one will require a different solution for top dressing. Soils with high clay content will receive more sand in the top dress and quite often we apply a sand only topdressing. Some lawns with a higher sand content will need an organic mix to help retain nutrients and hold water.

When applied following core aeration, the topdressing material filters into the holes opened by the aeration process, speeding turfgrass recovery. While it’s not required after aeration, we highly recommend it to improve your soil composition over time.

If you’ve ever played golf you’ve probably seen white sand all over the greens and tee boxes. The reason why is because golf courses routinely aerate and top dress with a special sand mix. There are major benefits of sand topdressing and you should consider adding this treatment to your season maintenance program.

What are the Benefits of Top Dressing Your Lawn?

Topdressing will modify the soil profile, though this takes multiple applications over a number of years. Typically, this practice is combined with core aeration, with a coarse-textured material (silica sand mix) applied to soils with high clay content (fine-textured). The goal is to alleviate compaction issues and improve water, air and nutrient movement into the soil (infiltration) and within the turfgrass root zone (percolation).

Combining Top Dressing with Over Seeding

Top Dressing and Overseeding together provide for a better environment for the seeds to take root and grow. We often do these two things together to help shade the seeds and our top dress mixes can give nutrients to the burgeoning seedlings.