Greens Aeration Complete - More Topdressing in Progress

After delaying and then postponing greens aeration due to beautiful weather and fast and firm playing conditions over the past several weeks, we did finally conduct our first session. For this aeration session we used small coring tines (approximately pencil sized diameter) with a very close spacing using our multi-tine coring head.

 Small diameter core aeration on greens now completed

Our typical processing of these cores is to drag or brush them to loosen the desirable sand material from the core allowing it to incorporate back into the turf canopy. What remains is essentially a small mass of roots and the attached turf which is then blown into piles and removed. This year though, we collected the cores and planted them in our turf nursery to re-establish this depleted  area. Between the ice damaged areas coming out of winter and the flood and heat damaged areas in late summer, most of our nursery was used in various fairway areas and replanting was necessary.

 Preparing Nursery Rootzone Medium

 Collecting Cores

 Placing and Leveling on Nursery Rootzone Sand

 Completed process showing tracked in or "dimpled" appearance of surface

The desirable outcome of this planting process (using cores) is that once established, the varieties of turf that we will have will be the same as those from which they were harvested. This allows us to replace turf, should it be damaged by ice, disease, heat, floods, lightning, equipment malfunction, vandals, or any other reason, with turf that is nearly identical in it's properties. In this manner of turf replacement both the appearance of the turf and the playability characteristics are retained compared to importing commercially available putting green or fairway type sod.

Following aeration the greens have been sand topdressed, broomed, and rolled (several times) and are reasonably smooth in spite of all the surface disruption. Our next aeration session (planned for mid Nov. will be Deep Tine Aeration using larger, solid tines. I'll post about this when we get a bit closer to beginning the work.