I'm well behind with blog posts, but it's better than being late with maintenance practices which are right on schedule.  April 9th, we aerified the greens with 1/4 inch quad tines on our Toro 648 Procore.  We had  to make a few adjustments to our original plan and settled with half as many holes as we hoped for.  The greens were lifting up way too much with all the tines in use so we had to pull a row.  Good for the golfers, but not that great for the greens.  We also verticut in two directions and wanted to go deep at 1/4" but the turf was too tight and bogged down the machine, so we settled with 1/8".  Good thing we are flexible.  Members were happy to see the small holes and the sand filled them up with no problem.  The greens were all healed up after ten days and back to normal height in 2 weeks time.























When we topdress with sand, we put down a little extra on purpose.  The worst thing you can do is apply too little sand and not fill the holes all the way to the top.  Sweeping the greens clean and removing the sand cap from the top of each hole will lead to bumpy greens for the next month or two. Aerification has many benefits and one major plus is the smooth surface that topdressing creates.  All the small depressions are filled in to improve ball roll and set the turf at a uniform height.  We only get to do this a few times a year, so we are very careful to get it right.

This year, we even got to use our old Mete-R-Matic topdresser, a 1983 model that still works really well.  Now that we have a new Progator to run the the Tycrop topdresser, the old unit can pull the Mete-R-Matic at any speed and achieve an even amount across the surface.  Having two topdressers throwing down sand saved us over 3 hours of this process, which means I wasn't here until dark.