The calendar may not agree, however for the Grounds team, 2024 is already here. While there are still some daily maintenance items we address, the vast majority of our efforts are currently being put towards creating a successful 2024 season.
A great example of this is the pre-emergent herbicide application which is taking place. This is one of the most important late fall tasks, as we are preventing annual grassy weeds from showing up six months from now.
Last week's aerification had #17 green starting out like this:
However, after all of the aerifying, sand, brooming and rolling, this week has it looking a bit different:
Yes, over five acres of turf covers were installed on the greens. With our H-2B employees finished for the season, this was a huge undertaking for the remaining staff. As usual, another great job by the team!
This past week's late fall greens aerification was a new experience for all of us. The weather during aerification typically has the team more concerned with keeping hydrated in the heat, than making sure we are wearing enough layers to stay warm. Below average temperatures in late November prevented us from getting out first thing in the morning.
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| Aerifying greens with snowflakes in the air, is unusual. |
Since the plan is for this to be the only major aerification event of the year for the greens, we need to impact as great an area of the putting surfaces as we have previously in the combined spring and late summer punching. To that end, we started last week by applying sand, then aerified with a deep solid tine, and brooming of the greens.
This was followed by a .5" hollow tine on a very tight spacing of 1.33" X 1.5". We then removed the plugs, applied additional topdressing sand, and a second brooming.
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| Solid tining completed on the left, and hollow tining on the right. |
So how much of the putting surface area were we able to impact with these hollow tines? Well, the 1.33" X 1.5" spacing gives us nine holes per foot side to side, and eight holes per foot front to back, for a total of 72 holes per square foot. The area of each .5" hole is: .25" X .25" X 3.14 = .19625" squared
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| That's a whole lot of holes. |
When we multiply the area of each plug removed by the number of holes per square foot: .19625" X 72 holes, we find that 14.13 square inches of material was removed per square foot.
With 144 square inches in a square foot, the hollow tining impacted approximately 10% of the greens' surface. As always, when you look at the greens, most people would estimate this figure to be quite a bit higher than 10%...
