I recently purchased a pair. Are these shoes beneficial at all? The spikes are about 2 1/2 inches long and there are 13 on each shoe. My goal is to get nice green grass in both areas. Can I use them as a precursor for fertilizer?

I've always had to laugh whenever I've seen ads for those shoes. If you haven't already worn them, take them back and get a refund.

First, you'll break your neck or your ankle stomping around with those on.....imagine the force it will take for you to jam the spikes all the way into the ground with each step, pull your foot back up, and do it again. It's not like the shoes help you to easily "multi-task" while you putter in your yard doing other things. Secondly, the spikes aren't wide enough to make a bit of difference when it comes to aerating your lawn, which is the primary reason to poke holes in your yard. Lastly, even if the shoes truly make holes large enough to truly aerate your yard, it would take you weeks to stomp holes into every sq. foot of your yard. Instead, just rent an aerating machine from Home Depot or Lowe's for 2 hours and get it done that way.

You don't need to poke holes in the soil to fertilize.

jewel covered it all.....

As Jewel stated those are a waste of time, energy, and money. While they may make some very small holes in your lawn those spikes simply push the soil aside and compact it more and they do not go deep enough into the soil to do any good (if they did you would be stuck in the first two steps you took unable to move further).
If your soil is really compacted enough to need aeration you need to rent a core aerator and then after running that over your lawn apply organic matter which over time and if enough is applied (not all at once however, but over time) will naturaly aerate your soil with no need to again rent that core aerator.

Crystal, if you do a Google on lawn aerating shoes, you'll quickly find that the vast majority of folks think they're a waste of money. And I've heard alot of posters here say the same. So if I were you, I'd take 'em back and get a refund.

First, your soil doesn't have to be compacted for it to benefit from aeration... Look at sports fields... like pro baseball field. They are areated at least once a year... and not because they are compacted.

Second, using an aerator then fertilizing is a waste of fertilizer... The fertilizer is designed to feed the roots of the grass... and grass has shallow root. If you poke 2" deep hole in your lawn, then put fertilizer down the holes, its wasted.

Third... Kimm is correct in that compost will do essentially the same thing, and you don't have to rent a machine to put it down, or resort to chemicals.

quote:

Originally posted by crystalj:
I recently purchased a pair. Are these shoes beneficial at all? The spikes are about 2 1/2 inches long and there are 13 on each shoe. My goal is to get nice green grass in both areas. Can I use them as a precursor for fertilizer?

As has been said, these will not do what you think they will, and they have nothing to do with greening up your grass. Golf courses use a similar tool on a roller to punch holes and aerate their greens but golf greens are a very special situation.

If you think your soil is hard, and I mean hard even when it is wet, punching holes in it will help you retain water if you water right away. That is the only benefit I see to the plug aeration equipment. The reason the soil get hard (even when wet) is the beneficial soil fungal population has declined. The way to restore the fungi is to 1) never use fungicides, sulfur, or baking soda on your lawn, 2) apply a food that the fungi like to eat (corn meal, wheat flour, and even free used coffee grounds from Starbucks), 3) moisten the soil slowly with a soaker hose for a total of 3 weeks. Yes, 3 weeks. My soil gets hard every other year and I treat it this way. I stretch the black soaker hose out and turn it on at a trickle. The trickle rate is 1 cup per minute out of the faucet. Then I leave it running day and night for a week. Then I move the hose about 18 inches and continue. When I have covered the entire yard I start over where I started and go another week in each spot. When I finish the second round I repeat one last time. At the end my soil is so soft it is difficult to keep your balance when it's moist. It's like walking on beach sand. When it is dry, it becomes very firm again, but when I water, every drop soaks in fast and the soil softens like before. What has happened is the soil fungi have repopulated. The water at a trickle provides enough moisture to create a perfect growing environment without smothering them by flooding and cutting off the air. Simply punching a few hundred holes in the lawn with an aerator will only work for a few days. The fungi aerate by pushing soil particles aside and lifting them. They create millions of microscopic holes per square inch. No mechanical aerator can come close to that kind of performance.

Mother Nature's natural aerator insects are the dung beetle. They dig holes about 3/4 inch in diameter and anywhere from 1 to 10 feet deep. No mechanical aerator can do that, either. With a hundreds of holes per square yard, these can really hold a lot of water in a pasture.

But softening your soil has little to do with greening your grass. I would need to know a lot more about what you have, where you live, what grass you want to have, how much you water, and how high you have been mowing before the green grass question could be addressed. I guess it would help to know what fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides you've used, too.