Preparations For Greens Aeration on Monday, October 19th

Over the next few days, we will be increasing the watering of our greens to push moisture through the profile. I sprayed a couple of wetting agent/penetrate products that will assist with getting the water through the layers on our greens. This material will also suppress dew helping the surfaces dry quicker during aeration allowing us to get started quicker in the mornings. We are trying to get moisture to the soil layer which was the original surface of our greens when they were built many eons ago. If this layer is too dry, the tines stick and heaves the turf forcing us to shorten the depth of our aeration which we don't want to happen. The deeper we go with aeration, the greater the benefit for our turf. 

The original depth of our greens is 5-6" below the surface where you are currently putting on. Modern greens keepers have used sand to help smooth the surfaces and improve drainage. We have 18 of these greens at Glen Echo. With no rain and watering lightly to keep ball roll out long and smooth in the last 30 days, we have gotten drier down in this soil layer than we should be. We also fertilized our greens last week and have not applied the regulator we used over the last month that assisted us as well. All these things in combination will allow us to get our work completed in a timely and efficient manner and should assist us with healing. I would expect the greens to be in good condition in the next 10-14 days after we have aerated.   

The soil depth is about 2-2.5" deep at the bottom of the hole with the sand between 5-6" in depth . Right at the point of the arrow you can see an old aeration hole going down into the soil layer. Our goal with the aeration is to create channels down into the soil layer allowing moisture to move through the bottom of the green. This also creates channels for rooting and gas exchange with the good Oxygen entering the root zone and the bad when too much has built up Carbon Dioxide can escape from the soil.