Expert Q&A for How to Till a Lawn

Tilling helps aerate your soil. It also gives you a chance to add extra nutrients and amendments, like manure, fertilizer, and mulch.

Tilling soil just involves digging up the soil and turning it around. This gives the dirt some room to breathe.

Getting your lawn ready for tilling takes a few steps. First, make sure the soil is moist before you start tilling — that makes it much easier to work with. Once you've tilled thoroughly, go over the area and remove any rocks or stones that the tiller brought up. Take a rake and smooth out the soil so it's nice and level. At that point, you can test the soil and add things like compost or fertilizer if needed. After you seed or lay down new sod, roll over everything with a lawn roller to get rid of air pockets from tilling. Doing all that prep work will give your new lawn the best chance to grow thick and healthy.

Definitely! I'm not a big fan of roto-sodding overall, because it will trigger more weed germination than you want in an instance of resodding. Also, even when we're doing what's called a lawn-to-garden conversion, it's going to trigger more wheat germination for that new garden region. So I tend to recommend a sod cutter.