Spring Fairway Aerification

Our Spring Fairway Aerification immediately follows the greens and tee aerification. It usually takes between 5-6 weeks to get everything aerified and top dressed. There are several reasons why this process is important culturally including increased air flow to the roots, compaction relief, and removal of built up organic debris also known as 'thatch'. Because our fairways are predominantly bentgrass which is a high thatch producing grass, we verticut the fairways before the aerifier punched them. Verticutting is a way to thin out the turf as well as remove thatch, using vertical blades that are set the desired depth.

 Fairway Aerification includes the following steps ( flag the heads, verticutting the fairway, aerifing, cleaning up the plugs with a sweeper and Pro-Gators, blowing/dragging the fairway, gypsum application, sand topdressing, and the last step is to drag the sand in the open holes.) Most of the process are shown in photo's below.

This is a photo of #10 being Verticut by the Graden. Notice that the rough in the left of this photo is verticut as well, this is one of our high traffic areas.

 

After the hole has been verticut the aefier then proceeds, this photo shows the operator going in a different direction on a mound in order to get a deeper plug.

After the hole has been aerified it is cleaned. This photo shows the tc-125 sweeper being pulled by a pro-gator. When the sweeper is full it is emptied in the back of a pro-gator, and the plugs are dumped on maintenace paths and/or the village c lot.

While the sweeper is picking up plugs there are a couple people using snow shovels to push cores out of low areas, which are either hand shoveled or picked up later with the sweeper.



Right behind the Sweeper is the blower which also has a drag mat attached, this picks up any smashed cores and debris and moves them to the pile for the sweeper to pick up.




After the gypsum and sand are put down, the fairway is gone over with a drag mat. The objective is to fill the holes and spread the sand out evenly.



This is an example of an area that has been dragged already to one that has not.