Late Summer Aeration

It's been quite some time since I last found time to update our blog, but this week starts the end-of-season maintenance practices that will span the next few months and updates here I know will be much appreciated.

Over the last two days, we completed our late-summer aeration of the greens. We did things a little differently this time, trying to find the best balance between efficiency, speed of recovery, achieving desired agronomic goals and minimal disruption to golfers. In all these aspects I feel we were very successful.

Using two newer-technology ProCore aerators, we were able to complete the full aeration process to all greens in 10 hours. Our new method involved putting down the topdressing sand first, aerating with hollow tines over the sand, applying fertilizers and amendments, dragging all the dried material to fill the holes, blowing off the removed and unwanted thatch, and finally watering it all in. Using this method eliminated the laborious task of having to manually remove all the plugs before sanding, which not only added time and alot of extra traffic to the green, but generated alot of waste material that builds up in the green waste area over time. By dragging the plugs, we knocked off alot of the existing sand, rich with organic material and fertilizers already existing in the green, to be mixed back in with new sand, leaving only the dry, problematic thatch material at the surface to be easily blown off into the surrounds to later be chopped up by mowers.

Aerating with 3/8" hollow tines over topdressing sand

Dragging in sand and plugs

 We also used a smaller size tine (3/8" as opposed to 1/2") to aid in speed of recovery. The beauty of it is that even though we used a smaller tine, we condensed the spacing such that we were able to remove the same amount of thatch as the larger tines. As a superintendent mentor of mine once told me: "A million small holes heals just as fast a dozen small holes; it's not the quantity, it's the size of the area that needs to be grown back over that determines healing time."

It always helps to take a step back and really think about this idea, along with many others, to determine WHY to aerate and also HOW. Doing practices such as these "just because everyone does it" is unwise and often unnecessary. There should always be a stated and desired goal to intense maintenance practices. In this case, ours is multi-fold: relieve compaction from summer traffic, provide an opening to allow nutrients, air and water to move deeper into the soil profile and removal of thatch near the surface that inhibits water penetration, facilitates optimum disease conditions and softens the receptiveness of the surface. Note that the first two goals can be achieved with solid tines and very little disruption. The messiness of pulling a core coupled with alot of sand is for the removal and dilution of thatch, which we currently have a good amount of. The long term goal is to reduce thatch to manageable levels then implement practices that constantly dilute and breakdown thatch without major aeration to hopefully one day move away from major disruptions, like these types of aerations, in favor of more numerous and minor disruptions, like bi-weekly verticutting and light topdressing coupled with solid tine aerations.

In any case, our new methods and practices will lend to overall better conditions, both long term and short term, and the greens should be back in shape faster than ever. A sneak preview of the speed of recovery can be found by watching the driving range practice green, which was aerated last Thursday and will show recovery results five days ahead of the rest of the course. So as soon as you think the practice green is good, the course will be the same 5 days later.

Driving range practice green - 5 days into recovery