Aerating your lawn is one of the beneficial factors that help promote healthier soil and grass. In your typical lawn care, aeration should be a part of your lawn’s regular health regimen to ensure good irrigation, improved soil, roots and grass health.

Lawn aeration allows the soil to breathe, thus allowing air, moisture and nutrients to flow into the roots. Punching holes in the ground can be done by using aeration tools that can be rented from garden supply centers. You can also hire someone who has the know-how or a company that does the job professionally.

Your lawn’s requirement for aeration will depend on how the soil has been treated over the years. The physical appearance of the lawn itself can help you determine when and how much aeration is needed for your lawn. If your lawn exhibits poor drainage, not-so green grass even after fertilization and bald spots, then it's time to aerate.

Lawn care, aeration and other beneficial treatments for your lawn seem to be high maintenance, but these treatments don't usually require daily or even monthly tending. Aeration will depend on how your lawn’s soil has been treated over the years, and aeration may be done once a year or every two years.

Lawns that are intensively treated and maintained usually require annual aeration to make sure the soil is healthy and ready for another helping of fertilizers and such.

If parts of your lawn have high traffic, it is important to aerate these parts more frequently. Soil on high traffic parts of your lawn becomes more compact which makes it harder for air, water and nutrients to penetrate.

For highly compact soil, it is advisable to water the lawn before aeration. Make sure you water your lawn up to the desired consistency for the soil to break up and allow air during aeration. Avoid flooding or just slightly damping your lawn, neither will be beneficial and it will be harder to aerate the soil in just one pass.

Should you pull the plugs? Plugs or soil plugs are the bits of soil that have been pulled out of the poked holes during the aeration process. You may leave these plugs to dry, and irrigation or rain will break up these plugs eventually.

After your lawn’s first round of aeration, you will see a huge difference in the quality and distribution of grass throughout your lawn. Lawn care, aeration and basic soil cultivation know-how are essential to keep your lawn greener and in tip-top shape.

If you have a tiny yard and would like a simple but well-maintained garden, you only need two things – determination and know-how.  Here are some tips on how to keep your garden by the yard looking spruced up and glamorous.

1. Deadheading
Keep your border free from wilted flowers and dried leaves. Deadheading or removing dead flower heads will encourage the plants to produce more blooms for longer. Many perennials such as geraniums and dahlias, and some annuals benefit from having spent blooms removed

2. Pinch out tops.
Certain plants – especially foliage plants like Coleus – respond with a spurt of growth when their tops are pinched out. Pinching out makes the plant much bushier and so more blooms are produced. Fuchsias are prone to becoming leggy unless they are pinched out.

3. Fertilize lightly.
A minimal amount of fertilizer will further boost the growth of your vegetation. If you water your yard frequently, you have to fertilize it more regularly because of nutrient depletion. A fortnightly application of liquid fertilizer is sometimes more beneficial than granules as it is more readily absorbed by the leaves. Container plants will be considerably healthier with a half-strength solution of liquid fertilizer applied regularly.

4. Weed out.
This is one of the best ways to preserve the beauty of your garden by the yard.  Remember, weeds compete with your plants for both nutrients and moisture. If the weeds are not close to seeding, leave them on the bed to rot down for mulch. If you must use a weedicide, try and get a wick applicator, rather than a spray. This will protect you plants from spray-drift.

5. Water them well
One good tip when it comes to watering your garden by the yard is to give it a thorough soaking once a week, making sure there is no run-off to cause erosion. Deep watering will encourage the growth of deeper roots that will be able to withstand dry spells weatherwise

6. Say no to chemicals
Chemicals are dangerous to humans and often kill the natural predators of the pest in your garden, so avoid them if possible. There are many organic alternatives that work almost as well.

With these simple tips, your garden by the yard will soon be the envy of your neighbors.

One of the best things about gardening is felling warm, moist dirt in your bare hands, but you will often end up with blistered, chapped, and scraped skin.  The solution to this problem is gardening gloves.  The more time you spend getting down and dirty in the garden, the more you need gardening gloves.  Gardening gloves will be able to ease some of the pain you would otherwise be subject to, letting you spend even more time playing in the dirt.

There are hundreds of different types of gloves on the market, and the kind of gardening glove you buy depends on the way you garden.  Some gloves offer protection against specific substances or things, for example, leather gloves are not the best for working with chemicals or water.  Many gardening gloves are specialized for pruning thorns, refilling gasoline tanks, or using a chain saw, while others are for general tasks such as raking, digging, and weeding.

After choosing the type of gardening glove you need, you must make sure and pick out the perfect fit.  Gloves that are too big have a tendency to slip off while gloves that are too small could cause aches and cramps.  Any glove that doesn’t fit could defeat the whole purpose of wearing gloves and cause blistering.  To find a glove with the best fit possible, try the gloves on both hands, make a fist, and imitate the movements you make when gardening.  If there is no pinching or slipping and the glove is comfortable then you have found your match.

Gardening gloves can be bought in many places and are produced by many companies, causing them all to have a different quality and price.  Most gloves can be washed in cool water and then air dried.  There are many different types of gloves you can purchase to satisfy your varying needs, such as cotton and cotton-polyester for general-purpose chores.  These are among the most popular gloves and are perfect for light chores in cool and dry weather.  Leather gloves can also be used for general chores but are heavier than cotton and polyester.  Chemical resistant gloves will help protect your hands against oils, acids, herbicides, pesticides, and many other chemicals.  Grip enhancing gloves are designed with rubber dots for extra gripping power.  Cut and puncture resistant gloves are designed to offer extra protection against sharp edges

If you are the type person that only wears gloves as an optional luxury for various tasks, you should think seriously for using specialized gardening gloves for many of the activities you will be doing outside.  There is really no reason not to wear gardening gloves; they protect your hands from the elements and don’t ever cost all that much.

Soil primarily had its beginning from rock together with animal and vegetable decay, if you can imagine long stretches or periods of time when great rock masses were crumbling and breaking up. Heat, water action, and friction were largely responsible for this. By friction here is meant the rubbing and grinding of rock mass against rock mass. Think of the huge rocks, a perfect chaos of them, bumping, scraping, settling against one another. What would be the result? Well, I am sure you all could work that out. This is what happened: bits of rock were worn off, a great deal of heat was produced, pieces of rock were pressed together to form new rock masses, some portions becoming dissolved in water. Why, I myself, almost feel the stress and strain of it all. Can you?

Then, too, there were great changes in temperature. First everything was heated to a high temperature, then gradually became cool. Just think of the cracking, the crumbling, the upheavals, that such changes must have caused! You know some of the effects in winter of sudden freezes and thaws. But the little examples of bursting water pipes and broken pitchers are as nothing to what was happening in the world during those days. The water and the gases in the atmosphere helped along this crumbling work.

From all this action of rubbing, which action we call mechanical, it is easy enough to understand how sand was formed. This represents one of the great divisions of soil sandy soil. The sea shores are great masses of pure sand. If soil were nothing but broken rock masses then indeed it would be very poor and unproductive. But the early forms of animal and vegetable life decaying became a part of the rock mass and a better soil resulted. So the soils we speak of as sandy soils have mixed with the sand other matter, sometimes clay, sometimes vegetable matter or humus, and often animal waste.

Clay brings us right to another class of soils clayey soils. It happens that certain portions of rock masses became dissolved when water trickled over them and heat was plenty and abundant. This dissolution took place largely because there is in the air a certain gas called carbon dioxide or carbonic acid gas. This gas attacks and changes certain substances in rocks. Sometimes you see great rocks with portions sticking up looking as if they had been eaten away. Carbonic acid did this. It changed this eaten part into something else which we call clay. A change like this is not mechanical but chemical. The difference in the two kinds of change is just this: in the one case of sand, where a mechanical change went on, you still have just what you started with, save that the size of the mass is smaller. You started with a big rock, and ended with little particles of sand. But you had no different kind of rock in the end. Mechanical action might be illustrated with a piece of lump sugar. Let the sugar represent a big mass of rock. Break up the sugar, and even the smallest bit is sugar. It is just so with the rock mass; but in the case of a chemical change you start with one thing and end with another. You started with a big mass of rock which had in it a portion that became changed by the acid acting on it. It ended in being an entirely different thing which we call clay. So in the case of chemical change a certain something is started with and in the end we have an entirely different thing. The clay soils are often called mud soils because of the amount of water used in their formation. 

The third sort of soil is lime soil. This soil of course ordinarily was formed from limestone. Just as soon as one thing is mentioned about which we know nothing, another comes up of which we are just as ignorant. And so a whole chain of questions follows. Now you are probably saying within yourselves, how was limestone first formed?

At one time ages ago the lower animal and plant forms picked from the water particles of lime. With the lime they formed skeletons or houses about themselves as protection from larger animals. Coral is representative of this class of skeleton-forming animal.

As the animal died the skeleton remained. Great masses of this living matter pressed all together, after ages, formed limestone. Some limestones are still in such shape that the shelly formation is still visible. Marble, another limestone, is somewhat crystalline in character. Another well-known limestone is chalk. Perhaps you'd like to know a way of always being able to tell limestone. Drop a little of this acid on some lime. See how it bubbles and fizzles. Then drop some on this chalk and on the marble, too. The same bubbling takes place. So lime must be in these three structures. One does not have to buy a special acid for this work, for even the household acids like vinegar will cause the same result.