Fairway Aeration

The front 9 was completed on Monday and we will work in the holes on the back as play allows over the next few days.  I was considering not aerating at all this season due to the drought and high heat but a reduction in the temperatures over the last 10 days and an open golf course on Monday for the first time in 3 weeks gave us the opening we needed to get well over 1/2 the fairways completed.  We lose a great deal of time during the morning with heavy dew/wet conditions.  The total process takes about 1.5-2 hours per fairway when the ground is dry but can take as much as 3 hours during the early morning hours.  Even though we used our rough aerator and did not use a close spacing fairway unit, we will still get some benefit from this aeration..

Our process included the following:

• Aerating the fairway.  
• A flail mower is used to break apart the cores.  The flail unit is fairly descriptive in how it works.  Paired spinning blades drive over the cores breaking them apart. 
• A drag is then used to break the remaining cores and help spread the dirt throughout the fairway.
• Tractor blower than blows the tufts of grass and excessive dirt across the fairway and into the rough.  
• We then finish the job off with mowing.

Aeration plugs lying on the fairway.  Normally we would have twice as many holes from 3"x3" spacing but our rough aerator is 6" x 6".

Skip using the flail mower to break up cores.

A view under the deck showing the multiple rows of small  2 3/4" blades in pairs staggered and spaced  to break up the cores.

Reggie dragging the remaining cores that do not get chopped up all the way.

 

Finished fairway after mowing.