AERATION ..... DAY 1

 

 

Here is an photo layout of what we did yesterday in about 13 hrs.

 

 

 

green after double direction vertical mowing.  verti-cutting thins out the turf and cuts the "runners" and blades of grass which have avoided the mowers.   

Verti-cutting greens, night before - following our Monday outing.  I came back to do as many as possible to get a head start on the process.

 

 

Ran out of daylight and got to witness this beautiful sunset on # 12 as I finished up for the evening.

following the verti-cutting was our greensmower, here Lisandro gets it done.  This cleans up the greens for the next process which is the aeration.

Pat ran our aerator on Tuesday.  He walked over 13 miles....backwards while aerating 12 greens. 

we used 3/8" tines that at 2.0" spacing

this is what the greens looked like behind Pat and the ProCore 648.



I promised the membership we would use tines the size of  a pencil to minimize damage and speed up recovery.  Here is a photo to prove the size of the hole.
 

While that was happening on the greens, two men were bringing in our fwy markers which were then painted by our mechanic when he had some time. 

Fairways begin....

at 7:20am the fairway aerating crew began.  they arrived the day before and were ready to go on schedule.

They had 5 machines working at most times and were able to cover ground quickly

The owner of the company was on sight throughout to keep things rolling.

 

Greens continue...

5 of our groundsmen then blew all the aerated cores into piles 

 

piles of cores, which were half thatch and half sand, were then removed from the greens

 

last green for the day was  #12



Next steps on the greens.....

any hotspots were watered, to avoid problems while dragging sand later.

sand topdressing was then applied at a very heavy rate to fill the holes and cover the putting surfaces

15 green topdressed

topdressing was then dragged into the holes and spread as evenly as possible,  below is a finished look at how the greens appear now.   the two holed plug is a foam insert that we place into the hole in the green to protect it from damage during the process. 

 finishing up the fairways for the day...

over a ton of ryegrass seed was the then broadcasted onto the fairways 

seed was then dragged into the holes while the aeration cores were broken up by dragging an old school tine harrow over them.  unfortunately, with no sun the whole day, the core were never properly dried for the process.

more dragging, and dragging and dragging.



the thatch was then blown into the roughs to hopefully be picked up tomorrow by the sweeper.

panorama view from 10 tee as a lot of work is happening all over.

blowing off 18 fairway.


So ends day one of the process, hope the weather continues to be on our side and praying that when we are done it rains like crazy for a few hours to clean it all up.

thanks for checking in....

see you soon, JohnnyP