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.
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| 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". |
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| Skip using the flail mower to break up cores. |
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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.
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| Reggie dragging the remaining cores that do not get chopped up all the way. |
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| Finished fairway after mowing. |
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