"More Sand, Laddie" 9/1/12

“More sand, laddie”

“Sand, sand, more sand, laddie,” was the favorite line of Old Tom Morris the original greenkeeper of The Old Course at St. Andrews.  It should also be noted that Morris was an accomplished player who won The Open Championship four times, so his understanding of the game went far beyond the agronomic side of golf.   Although Old Tom probably never imagined that the science and art of putting green maintenance would ever become what it has today, his emphasis on sand still rings true.

Like it or not aerification is a necessary evil that is in the golfer’s best interest.  Think of it as preventative maintenance similar to routine maintenance for your car or house.  Your car is running fine but you routinely change the oil because it extends the life and performance of car.  Ignoring routine maintenance can lead to big problems and big bills.  USGA putting greens are no different; they require a routine maintenance or aerification schedule that matches the growth rate and environment.  Unfortunately, our aerification process has not been matching our growth rate which has left us with sluggish performing greens.  Right now our greens are like and old race car with new paint job.  They look good but if you look under hood there is all kinds of work that need be done.  So much, that it’s going to take several trips to the garage for some major work before this race car can perform on the track again.

With that being said, take piece of mind in knowing that we will be taking our first step in restoring the performance of our greens during the up and coming aerification scheduled to start Sunday evening Sept. 9^th.  We will be punching the greens with a 5/8” coring tine this fall on the tightest spacing our machine can achieve.  By simply increasing the from a 3/8” tine to a 5/8” tine we can impact almost 3 times as much surface area.  The holes will then be back filled with a coarser sand to improve the physical characteristics of the upper profile.  Once the holes are filled we are going to punch them again with a smaller 3/8” solid tine and incorporate even more sand into the root zone. 

As part of the greens aeration process we will also be over seeding them with “007” bentgrass seed.  007 is an advanced generation creeping bentgrass that offers exceptional heat tolerance, disease resistant, cold weather color retention, very fine leaf blade density and salt tolerance. 

The fairway aerification will be the same as this Springs which consist of coring the fairways with 5/8” tines and topdressing them with 12 tons of sand per acre.  The coring and cleanup is contracted out to Growing Solutions Inc. They are scheduled to start Monday evening or Tuesday morning depending on when they finish up at Cripple Creek Golf Club.  We will again be applying sand and working it in right behind the aerification.  The sand application is the longest process as it takes a while to put out the 350 tons.