The Down Hill Slide.....and Now the Work Begins!

Starting a far back as the first week of September we began our fall aeration program. This years weather and staffing constraints caused us to shuffle the aeration schedule around a bit but we are now on the final leg. Properly timed fall aeration (ample recovery time) can be a real benefit for the fall health of the turf. Usually, a season of play and maintenance cause the soil conditions to be less than optimal for growing healthy turf (see July 8th posting for more aerating info). Aerating will decrease compaction and result in better air exchange within the root zone. In conjunction with the increased height of cut and the turfs growth habit in the fall the benefits of aerating will encourage root development and carbohydrate storage for overwintering.

We started first with the tees. There is a little bit more of a B.S. factor for tees and, as a result, we are a little less concerned about impacting playability and pulled a fairly large core. We top dress the tee's with recycled aerating cores from our spring greens aeration. That is one of the good things about being an old Poa golf course; you can recycle things like aeration cores and not worrying about spreading Poa seeds since it is everywhere already!

For the greens this time out it was all about the core. I was too scattered brained to take any pictures but we used a 3/8 tines on 1.5x2 spacing with an extra tine every second row resulting in a 1.5x1.5 spacing for those rows. Sounds confusing but all I'm really trying to say is we had more and bigger holes than the last time we pulled cores (again, see July 8th. FYI the spacing I commented on in that post was incorrect. It should read 1.5x2 spacing). The end result was a very large volume of material and more open holes for air exchange.

The past couple weeks have seen us pick away a aerating the fairways. We use slightly different aeration equipment for large area such as fairways that is best explained as a hollow aerating tines on rotating drums.

Pulling a core with the Fairway aerator

This style of aeration is beneficial for its speed and simplicity. It does pull a core to remove thatch and allows increase air and water exchange but offers little in terms of compaction relief. The good thing about the recent weather leading up to the nice spell we are experiencing now is the rain made the ground nice and soft which is allowing us to pull a good 3 to 4 inch core. A perfect world would have us using the same style aerator we use on the greens but the reality of our fairway root zone (or should I say "rock zone") limits our options to a fairly robust aerator such as the one pictured. We don't have the equipment or available material to top dress the fairways but we select certain areas and do a very limited overseed/top dress. I am always on the look out for a good, cheap source of sand since top dressing the fairways would be very beneficial for health and playability. No luck so far.