In between the rain events this month we have been plugging away at our long list of cultural practices. In mid-September we took advantage of a nice sunny day and ran our Sisis Verticutting unit on our tees. Verticutting is also known as dethatching. For compaction relief and thatch reduction, we have gone to solid tining tees in conjunction with deep verticutting on tees as opposed to the traditional hollow tine aeration. in the first picture you can see the amount of material that the Sisis brings up. We follow up with a blowing and finally a healthy topdressing of straight sand to fill the lines. In the third picture you can see the finished product. This process not only reduces thatch, but also provides a firmer and more level teeing surface.
A week has passed since our annual spring greens aeration. We have had a mixed bag of weather, hot, dry, cold, wet and even frost! These conditions make it challenging to aid in healing, but with the more recent consistent warm temperatures we are seeing solid recovery. We were fortunate to have decent weather to complete the process on time, allowing us to fill all the holes created by the 1/2” hollow tines. As there are some minor depressions within some of the holes we will be beginning our bi-weekly topdressing program early next week. Our team is mowing and rolling our greens daily, while slowly lowering our height of cut to our summer norm. We all know that spring cultural practices are not popular among golfers, but these all important tasks are the building blocks for high performance greens conditions throughout the heart of the golf season. Check out this video produced by the USGA on Aerations effect on putting...
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