I'm wearing a jacket at 2 in the afternoon! Must be time to aerify something!

As a lovely afternoon chill blankets the golf course, I start to get the itch to punch some holes!  Normally, we would be considering aerifying the greens about now, but since we moved green and fairway aerification to October, we will get started with the tees.  Today, we were able to get 12 sets of tees aerified and hopefully finish them off in the next couple of days.  If the predicted poor weather comes, bear with us as we cannot punch tees in the rain.  We will try to finish them no later than next week. 
If you played today and wondered what the little 'grooves' in the fairways are, we have also started 'verti-cutting' fairways.  Using a row of vertically oriented blades that look similar to an asterisk, we are lightly thinning the canopy and standing the grass blades up. This activity also severs 'stolons' (aka lateral growth stems) to stimulate 'creeping' to help fill in weak areas.  Also, verti-cutting serves to lightly 'de-thatch' the fairways by removing excess dead grass tissue and other organic matter in the upper profile.  This will hopefully make for a healthier canopy as the plants start to throw down roots.  Also, it should provide a better canopy to allow our upcoming granular fertilizer applications to get down into the soil and less susceptible to mower pickup.

Now that the stresses of a difficult summer are behind us, we are just starting to do the things that will make us healthier for next season.  I will keep you up to date as we go through our steps.  As a side note, Greens aerification will be Monday, October 3rd.

CLICK ON THE 'PLAY' BUTTON BELOW TO SEE THE AERIFIER IN ACTION ON 17 TEE

We are using 3/4" tines at 2x2 spacing.  Lots of nice, clean holes.  This creates an opportunity for gas exchange, nice channels for new fall roots, and better drainage.

The vertical mower that chops up the aerification plugs.



After we chop them up with the vertical mower, not much but thatch and 'fuzz' left over.



Then we drag with a heavy brush to get the last of it broken up.

Andy blowing off the 'fuzz'

The final result.  A few holes not filled, but no big deal on tees.

A closeup of the fairway verti-cutter unit attached to our normal fairway mower.

Very subtle.  The right side of the picture is the 'grooves' from the verticutting.  The left side has yet to be cut.  We will do a much more aggressive de-thatching later this month.