Spring Aerification Update Part IV

Monday March 25th was at one point forecasted to be raining as I chronicled is our previous Spring Aeration Updates. Fortunately the rain forecast stalled and your ready to go GCM staff  aerated all 18 regulation greens as well as the upper putting green before it started raining. Unfortunately  the subsequent 11 days of weather has produced only 1 day of sunshine. The rain that was associated with these 11 dreary days did help push sand downwards into the surface, but  as we all learned in grammar school science class, photosynthesis requires sunlight to make carbohydrate food for plant growth.

#3 Green 10 days out from core aeration on 3/25/19. With some sun, the very visible
holes would be close to covered by now.

Because of this dreariness, I would say the greens are at least a week behind their normal recovery curve. It wont stay dreary forever so as soon as we get some sustained sunlight those aeration holes will grow over. In the mean time we will continue to roll and mow as well as lightly sand topdress the surfaces to produce some semblance of putting quality.

Close up of a green 10 days out from core aeration on 3/25/19.

We were able to get the fairways aerated with solid tines during this period as well as getting them topdressed with sand. The solid tine pattern recovers much quicker and can be done in cloudy, semi wet weather  as opposed to pulling a core which would have required dry weather to both punch and clean up.

As you can see, we can solid tine aerate when it is a little wet. This process recovers much quicker
but does not remove any excess organic matter.

Solid tine aeration pattern. These holes are about 4" deep. You can see that the fairway
height grass almost hides the opening of the hole. Hence the ultra quick recovery
of solid tine aeration.

So as soon as we get some sun the greens will recover from aeration quickly and we can get our putting quality back in short period of time. Thanks as always for your support.