Aeration recap

The aeration process took place last week. Some cool nights and moderate daytime temperatures helped the process. We had a few hiccups, but we were able to complete everything on time.

Our greens aeration program has been going strong for several years now. The staff knows the routine and they work hard to finish. This year everything continued positively.

The weather was the biggest influence on how the aeration process played out. Monday was a great day for aeration- a cool night followed by a cool, clear day- and nearly everything on Monday went according to plan. Tuesday is when we had to really make some adjustments. Tuesday had another cool night leading into another cool day, however, a very persistent cloud cover lasted until nearly 1pm. This made it very slow for the material we pulled out of the ground to dry, especially the fairways.

Using hollow tines removes material- thatch and soil- from the ground. On the greens, we shovel this up and remove it by hand, which is not dependent on drying time. However, on the fairways, we do not remove the soil, only the thatch. To accomplish this, we drag the cores with a steel drag mat that breaks up the soil chunks and dislodges the thatch. We then blow the thatch material out into the rough. If you try and drag the cores when they are still wet, you get smeared mud. So, on Tuesday we had to wait extra long for the cores to dry- in fact they were not completely dry when we started, but time was running out!

The result of all of this was that the fairways did not clean up quite as well as expected or hoped. A bit more soil was left at the surface than we wanted, as well as the Bermuda grass having more mud on the leaves than usual. This forced us to drag and blow, drag and blow, the rest of the week to try and get the fairways where we wanted them to be. In the end, we accomplished our goal, it just took a little while longer.

A separate but related issue we saw was isolated to #3 fairway. The cores that we pulled out of the last half of this particular fairway were nearly as hard as concrete. Due to this hardness, even repeated passes with the steel mat did not break the cores up well. #3 fairway alone was drug 11 times over 4 days. We believe two factors were at play that created such hard soil. First, we are several inches behind for our yearly rainfall total. No consistent or heavy rains have been able to penetrate the soil to the depth from which we pulled cores. Second, this section of #3 fairway was heavily altered during construction in 2014. The construction crews worked very hard to stockpile and then redistribute topsoil to all disturbed areas, but it wasn’t perfect. This area was evidently shorted some good soil. So, we pulled cores out of sub-soil with poor tilth. Although we have pulled cores before, we have only done it 2 other times to this portion, so no significant soil alteration has taken place in the past years.

 

A chunk of soil from #3 fairway. While you can't 
tell how hard the dirt is from the picture,
it does resemble a terra cotta pot.

Thank you for your patience while we performed the very necessary aeration practices this past week. Mother nature threw us some curveballs, but in the end, we accomplished all that we needed to. We are set up nicely to head into the final stretch of the season.

 

Etiquette Reminder of the Month

Please remember to remove any bunker sand that may be stuck to your spikes before walking on the greens.

Also, as part of a Golf Committee initiative to improve course etiquette, we have included links to videos teaching proper on course etiquette. Please take a moment to watch:

Ball Marks - How to properly repair

 

See you on the course!

Joe

jvillegas@bwrc.org