Toronto Star Features Arbutus Ridge Golf Club, 2012

Aeration

As mentioned before in earlier blogs, the necessary evil of aeration is extremely beneficial to turf health. I have also attached this link from the USGA regarding aeration and it's necessity:

http://www.usga.org/turf/articles/video/aerate_greens.html 

We schedule to begin aeration on Sundays around 1:00pm-4:00pm (1pm in spring & 4pm in summer) and hope to get all greens, tees, approaches completed by the end of day on Tuesday. We normally have some topdressing to finish on Wednesday morning. This is all weather dependent of course as we need full sun to complete the process. We are able to pull aerate while it is raining but unfortunately we are unable to perform any topdressing to fill the holes. For the topdressing process we need sun and lots of it. The sand must be completely dry before we can drag mat it back into the holes. If the sand is wet and we mat, we will basically cap the holes and have then compromised the whole process. We normally pull a core while aerating but sometimes we use small solid tines in between regular aeration and sometimes we do deep solid tine aeration. In the summer of 2012 we will be deep tining our greens rather than pulling a core. This decision is based on current conditions and will not happen regularly. With that said I am crossing my fingers that we get some nice sunny weather!