If you’re planning to dethatch your lawn, or you already have, then you’ll probably be wondering what you should do next. Well, there are several aftercare steps you’ll want to do to ensure your lawn bounces back strong and healthy and you get the most from all your hard work. So what should you do after dethatching your lawn? Let’s find out.
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What To Do After Dethatching (The Overview)
Once you have finished dethatching your lawn, it is essential to follow certain aftercare steps to aid your lawn’s recovery. These steps reduce the stress caused by dethatching and enhance the final result, leading to additional benefits.
Here are six steps to take after dethatching a lawn.
- Dispose of Thatch
- Mow
- Water
- Aerate
- Overseed
- Fertilize
Before You Begin Dethatching – READ FIRST !!
If you are still in the planning stages of dethatching your lawn, here are a few articles that can help you cover all bases. Dethatching isn’t difficult, but it is easy to get wrong.
- How to Tell if Your Lawn Needs Dethatching
- What is Lawn Thatch?
- How to Dethatch Your Lawn
- When to Dethatch a Lawn
- How Often to Dethatch a Lawn
- Mistakes to Avoid When Dethatching
- Which is Better, Dethatching vs Scarifing?
- Best Lawn Dethatchers 2023
- 5 Ways Dethatching Can Damage Your Lawn
Dethatching Aftercare (A Closer Look)
Ok, so there appears to be more to dethatching than just running your dethatcher over your lawn for a few hours. Therefore, let’s go over each dethatching aftercare task and see what needs to be done.
Dispose of Thatch
The first job is to remove all the thatch that your dethatcher pulled out of your lawn. Now, if you have a dethatcher with a collection bag, then most of the work is probably already done for you. But, if you use a rake or a towable dethatcher, then there’s still lots of work to be done. So, you could use a rake or a leaf blower to gather all the thatch into a pile, or maybe you have a leaf sweeper lurking in the shed waiting to do most of the work for you.
Either way, you’ll need to remove all the thatch or a least as much as you can from your lawn so it doesn’t have a chance of settling back into your lawn. If this happens, you’ll pretty much be back at square one.
Now you may be wondering if you should use your lawn mower with a collection bag to pick up all the loose thatch. Well, you could, but you’ll find that your collection bag will fill up with thatch after just a few feet. So, you’ll spend most of your time emptying your collection bag and not getting much done. So, rolling up your sleeves and grabbing a rake will probably end up being quicker.
Mow Your Lawn
Once you finish picking up all the loose thatch, you’ll probably notice that your lawn looks fairly rough around the edges. This will be the case with any lawn that has just been dethatched and cleared up. So you’re not alone when it comes to having a rough-looking lawn. A quick way to get your lawn looking tidy again is to mow your lawn. Now this will achieve two things. It will pick up any remaining loose thatch, and mowing will make your lawn look even again.
Water Your Lawn
Next, you want to give your lawn a nice long soak. This will give your lawn some much-needed water to help it recover quickly. Now, in my steps for how to dethatch a lawn, I make a point of not watering my lawn before I dethatch, as this can cause a bunch of problems. I even go so far as to turn off my irrigation system for a day or two beforehand. So, giving your lawn a good soak will also compensate for any water it has been missing out on.
Lawn Aeration
Dethatching and aeration are typically two lawn care tasks that go hand in hand with one another. Why? Well, dethatching and aeration both benefit your lawn’s growing environment and involve the soil layers. Dethatching deals with the thatch layer, and aerating deals with the topsoil layer. So, in an ideal situation, maintaining both layers will give your lawn a greatly improved environment to grow.
Now if you regularly aerate your lawn, you’ll likely be up to speed with working out what is needed and how deep you need to penetrate the soil. But if you are new to aeration, you want to do a penetration test first. This test uses a metal spike that is pushed into the ground to figure out if your lawn needs aeration. But as a general rule, you should aerate whenever you dethatch your lawn.
Overseeding Your Lawn
Now this step is only for lawns that require seeding. So, lawns with grass types, such as St. Augustine, which only grow from stolons or runners, don’t need to worry about this step. The basic idea is that because dethatching opens up access to the soil, the seeds have a much greater chance of germinating. So, when planning your dethatching, be sure to add seeding into the plan. Not only do you increase the success rate of seed germination, but you also reduce the amount of grass seed required. That’s money back in your pocket.
Fertilize Your Lawn
After around six or seven days, giving your lawn a good feed of quick-release fertilizer is recommended. Fertilizer provides your lawn with the much-needed nutrients needed to assist in the recovery process and provide food going forwards.
Now you want to avoid fertilizing too quickly as many grass blades will be torn and exposed. You really need to wait a week for these exposed parts of the grass blade to heal so as not to burn the grass. After all, fertilizer does not benefit the grass blades, only the roots.
Then several weeks later, or when the quick-release fertilizer is exhausted, you should apply a slow-release fertilizer. This is so that your lawn receives a constant regulated supply of nutrients. Because slow-release fertilizers can take a week or so before the nutrients are available to the lawn, they are not recommended for the first application.
Dethatching Aftercare Calendar
Just so you don’t forget any of the steps, here’s my detaching aftercare schedule, including an extra seventh step!
Detaching Aftercare Schedule
| Aftercare Step | Task | When to Complete |
|---|---|---|
| Step 1 | Dispose of Loose Thatch | Day 1 |
| Step 2 | Mow Your Lawn | Day 1 |
| Step 3 | Water Your Lawn | Day 1 |
| Step 4 | Lawn Aeration | Day 1 |
| Step 5 | Overseeding | Day 7 |
| Step 6 | Fertilizer Quick-Release Fertilizer Slow-Release | Day 7 Day 45 |
| Step 7 | Plan Your Next Dethatching | Day 1 |
