May Aerification...........

  We finished our second aerification for the year today. We pulled 5/8" cores on a 2x3" spacing. We tried a few new techniques this time around. I'm always trying to improve the efficiency of this process and also keeping the playability of the greens.

 1st thing we changed is we topdressed greens before we pulled cores.

2nd we purchased the turf pride core collector. This enables us to drag some of the topdressing sand into the holes while also dragging cores to the edge for removal. By topdressing first, we keep the heavy topdresser from driving across the soften green and leaving tire ruts.

 
This time around we also increased the length of our tines from 5.5" to 6.5". this is probable the largest tines you could put on the Aercore .

 

We also tried using Fly mowers to move the sand into the holes. This worked good, but we experienced some bruising from some of the guys going over the same spot to much. We did 3 greens like this.

 We settled on just using one pass with a drag mat and rolling afterwards. I came back with a Humic Acid 70 granular product from Plant Food. After all this we still had a few holes open so I used the Dakota topdresser to apply a lite dusting. We then used dew whips to smooth out the sand with out having to drag the greens again.