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Top dressing is the process of applying compost, soil, or sand over the surface of your lawn. It has been performed on golf courses since the sport was invented in Scotland, but has only recently become popular on home lawns.
Good soil is living soil. That may sound like a cliché, but it’s true. One tablespoon of soil can contain billions of microorganisms. These microscopic organisms are one of the reasons we have plants and trees. In nature, soil microbes enrich soil by converting fallen leaves, limbs and other debris into nutrients plants can use. Since many home lawns have poor quality soil, top dressing becomes even more important. Top dressing is simply a way of adding organic material and restoring the balance to home lawns, building better soil and increasing soil flora.
Benefits of compost topdressing:
- Adds organic matter to soils
- Builds up the soil flora
- Helps improve soil structure
- Helps reduce lawn diseases
- Reduces traffic stress and relieves compaction problems
- Helps with water retention
- Reduces the need for fertilizer
- Can help reduce thatch
- Increases Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC) of your soil – the degree to which soil can absorb and exchange cations (positively charged ions)
- Evens out the lumps and bumps that are present on an uneven lawn
The Legacy Turf Care approach to top dressing starts with using the highest quality organic compost blends available. Using the most efficient, powered compost spreader that is calibrated to spread a ¼” thick layer of compost evenly across your lawn.
We apply ¼”thick layers Spring & Fall to slowly introduce high quality organic compost into your existing clay soils. Going any thicker then ¼” at a time would create impenetrable layers of soil that could choke the fescues ability to retrieve oxygen, nutrients & water.
When done correctly you will not see bumps & lumps of compost on top of the tall fescue. Our state of the art machines spread the organic compost so evenly that it works its way down to the base of the fescue rather quickly, making it more readily available to the grass for nutrient uptake and less visible from the surface.