This week we were able to get out and top dress and needle tine all of the greens. We split it up into two days with the front nine on Monday and the back nine on Tuesday. The main reason for this process was to open up the greens for a little air and gas exchange as well as break the surface tension that the bent grass creates to get more water below the surface. After the good flushing we received from the rains this last month the greens have been growing really well.
We have been fighting a few hot spots on the greens in the last couple of weeks as you can see in the picture below.
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| Dry Area on #6 Green |
The process we went through the last couple mornings included mowing of the greens, top dressing the greens and aerification with an 8mm needle tine at 2" x 2" spacing. Next we used our sweep-n-fill sweeper to brush the sand into the turf canopy and followed that up with our greens roller. The final step was to run 4 to 5 minutes of water to get the greens through the day until we are able to get 30+ minutes of water on the greens at night.
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| View of the aerator on #3 green |
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| View of the green before the needle tine |
This time around we were able to use our new roller attachment on our Toro 648 greens aerator. This was definitely a good purchase as we seemed to have a better after aerification look with less tufting of the aerification holes. Here's a look at the new roller.
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| New roller on the aerator |
We will continue to monitor the greens pretty close in the next few days to make sure they don't dry out more than we want since there will be a little more air reaching the root zone. We will be spraying greens on Wednesday with our bi-weekly foliar fertilizer application. We will also be spreading some gypsum and a 0-0-25 fertilizer with some minor nutrients to help get us through the next couple of months. All in all we should be healed up by the weekend and back to normal by next Monday.
