No Pain, No Gain...

I have mentioned before, performing agronomic practices that benefit turfgrass for the long term, can sometimes stress the turfgrass in the short term. One of my favourite sayings is of course "No Pain, No Gain". Basically saying that "the end justifies the means".

As I am sure some of our members have noticed our aerification process has brought out some of the vulnerabilities of our property. On fairways you may notice some very dry and stressed areas (top picture) as a result of the aerification on a hot and dry August day. With the very wet spring and summer that we have had, the root growth on our turf is shallow. In some of these areas the aerifier separated the turf at the root ends and has dried out considerably. Fortunately, one of the benefits of aerification is the promotion of root growth. We are doing our best to hand water and manage these areas to promote recovery... if the forecast holds true with rain and nice warm growing weather we should recover relatively quickly.

On our greens, there is obviously alot of sand for the turf to grow through (normal for our greens program). You may have noticed some stressed/scalped area on the outside perimeter of our greens (bottom picture). This is a result of the heavy verticutting that we did. There is an issue with thatch build up on the perimeters, this is attributed to the mowing pattern in which we do with the triplex ride on greens mowers. The ride on machines are very heavy, there is a syndrome aptly named triplex ring syndrome, this is the heavy wear and tear from the tires of the mower circling the greens continuously. We try to avoid this by skipping the perimeter cut as often as we can. We are even starting to cut the perimeter with one of our walking mowers. I realize that the result of this practice (verticutting) is rather unsightly, but obviously if 90% of the green is not effected by this process, there is a problem with these areas. Through diligent aerification, verticutting and cultural management we will resolve these issues, there will just be a few bumps and bruises (literally) along the way. To aid in recovery along with fertilizer, we have put some bent grass seed down in these areas to promote some more desirable grass along the worn areas.