The problem is that your lawn isn’t receiving the oxygen, water and nutrients that it needs to grow strong and healthy and so look lush and vibrant. The Hyundai 212cc Petrol Scarifier is perfect for both smaller and large lawns and is a good alturnative to electric scarifiers for more domestic use. This layer can prevent water, oxygen and nutrients penetrating the ground and reaching the grass root. You should only scarify when the ground is dry, so if there are a lot of April showers, it’s better to wait until May for a dry day when any surface water has had a chance to drain away or evaporate.

Some scarifiers come with both a scarifying attachment with thick blades and a separate aerating attachment with steel spikes for raking the lawn. Using this manual scarifier is fairly hard work as you’re digging the tines down into the bound-up thatch in the grass, and sometimes you may be digging down into the soil. You’ll find it takes a few days for the moss killer to take effect and after one week, the moss should turn a dark brown or black colour.Some of our machines are already equipped with an aerator roller in addition to the included scarifier roller. Aeration is particularly beneficial in areas of high soil compaction which can lead to poor drainage as well as an unhealthy lawn as nutrients will just sit on top of the ground rather than making their way down to the grass roots. This is important, as the blades should, for example, touch the ground just level when scarifying to avoid unnecessary wear and tear and damage to the lawn roots.

It lifts dead organic matter, grass cutting and moss but for large areas it’s impractical and if you’re too aggressive with a rake, you’ll damage the lawn. Your choice of power is electric for convenience, petrol for more power, or manual, in which you provide the muscle power, ok for small lawns but you wouldn’t want to scarify a large lawn manually. At 1500 watts, this is a powerful device and it comes with adjustable cutting heights, choose from 4 settings.A couple of weeks later, I always go over the lawn on the second height setting to give it another less aggressive once over. Ideally, you want to do a light scarifying in spring around April just to remove any moss that had built up over winter. An aerator either punches lots of holes into your lawn with a set of spikes (often on a big roller) or removes lots of tiny cores from your lawn.

This process prevents the build-up of surface water which encourages moss growth and compacts the soil. The Combe-Care 2 in 1 has 5 working heights so you can select the correct depth for each cassette function. My Best Lawn Scarifiers review looks at scarifiers that let you effectively remove moss and thatch from your lawn and some even include lawn aerator attachments. This model has a durable steel deck which is obviously better than plastic and the wheels have a wide tread which makes it very easy to manoeuvre but also doesn’t leave tread lines in the lawn like some models I have used in the past have.I love this model and have used it on my own lawn, my dad’s two very large lawns and my brother’s which is also a very large lawn.

in-1 powered scarifiers, on the other hand, feature two interchangeable drums, one with scarifying tines to rake through the grass and remove thatch as well as organic debris, while the other has metal blades, which cut into the turf creating shallow slits to aerate the soil surface. Weighing 9kg, it’s noticeably lightweight – in fact it has a tendency to tip backwards when not in use and it’s also noisier than some of the others we tested, reaching 98dB. I feel that the extra weight of a petrol model and steel build make it more effective at removing moss as it helps push the blades into the ground better. This will give you a chance to reseed any bare batches while the ground is still warm and there will be fewer weed seeds to worry about. The steel blades of the scarifier penetrate the grass and thoroughly remove thatch as well as moss and plant residues.Overall a reliable more heavy-duty model which is designed to meet the demanding jobs of professional grounds maintenance. In the autumn, there tends to be a bigger build up of thatch and moss so you may find you need to carry out three or four passes across your lawn. In terms of how well it collects, it comes with a 50 litre collection box, now this works great and it collects a lot of moss but it will fill up very quickly. It’s important to note that if you find you have too much thatch, dead grass and moss infestations in your turf, you will need to scarify more intensely than you did during the spring. But why do some gardens look like a dried-out desert and the lawn of the neighbour's garden glows with the most beautiful green?