Greens Aeration Process

Our yearly greens core aeration program was just completed over the past two days.  Ten staff members working well over 150 hours to complete this task.  We still have some clean up along the edges and approaches of greens to remove some of the excess sand.

Our depth of aeration was set at 4-4 1/2" which placed the aeration into the soil layer of our push up greens.

The USGA has a great animation video discussing why we aerate greens. 

 

Our program over the season will include multiple venting of greens on a monthly basis with a 1/4 tine.  This process is very limited in its surface disruption.  In most cases, you will not see it the next day.  We will also contract out the water injection aeration program at least one time during the heat of the season and will conclude our aeration program in the fall with a solid needle tined operation in late October.

Russ Klevorn operationg the Verti-drain 7316 deep tined aerator on Monday/Tuesday.  We were using a 1/2" coring tine.

The trail of aeration plugs left on the green.  On the far right side you can see the core harvester which picks up the plugs as they are pulled out of the green.  

Mechanic Harry and Jeff working the core harvester.  Normally the machine does not drive on the plugs first but on this green the angle required the machine to drive on the inside for the first pass.  The rest of the time we operate without smashing the plugs into the green surface.  Once the surface was clean of plugs, we placed a soil/sand amendment application on the green which helps to provide some supplemental nutrients to the sand layer.

Assistand Skip topdressed/buried the greens  with sand to help fill up all of the holes.  We placed about 5200 pounds of sand on each green.

Not pictured is Nick with  the drag brush operation.  Once they were dragged in 3-4 different directions, Jason used our portable blower to help move the sand into the holes to completion  Some excess sand then had to be removed from the green.  One last dragging to smooth the surface.

Tom and Arian rolled the green to help smooth down the holes.  Normally we would mow the greens last but there was not much turf that needed to be trimmed.  Our first mowing was completed today.

The greens were then fertilized and watered a couple of times to water in the fertilizer plus help settle the sand.  The staff have been going around cleaning the edges with blowers to remove the heavy application of sand away from the warm season grass and the edge between the green collars and rough/fairway height turf.

Some sections of certain greens might need an extra dragging in the next few days in the case that some excessive sand still remains on the green surface.  I think the overall program worked well with 99.9% of the holes filled with sand.  Not a great deal of heaving or tire rutting issues.  I would expect the greens to heal over the next 10-14 days and improve in their ball roll everyday.  We intend to put the walk mowers on the greens before opening day on April 16th.