Summer Maintenance/Tour Preparations 2014

For the last 9 days the East Lake Agronomy team has been doing some of our last heavy cultural practices on the course prior to The 2014 Tour Championship presented by Coca-Cola. Fortunately, we have been closed for summer maintenance those nine days and took full advantage having the course to ourselves.

Our summer maintenance program started off last Sunday with a heavy topdressing followed by a 5/8" x 1.5" x 1.5" aerification on the greens . The 5/8 tine removes approximately 13.64% surface area of the green.

Following the greens aerification we decided to dryject the greens this year instead of the graden contour sand injection. Dryject's high pressure, water-based injection system blasts aeration holes through the root zone to fracture the soil, while its vacuum technology simultaneously fills the resulting holes with amendment. This process breaks through compaction layers, increases water filtration, reaches the root zone with much needed oxygen and amends soil at the same time, leaving the surface smooth and playable.

What we don't see below the surface.

Profile showing the dryject depth to 4 inches

Once dryject was complete we loaded the topdresser again and added more material to the putting surface. This was followed by a back track verticut at a depth of .20" in two directions. This was the most aggressive depth that we have used so far this year. As you could guess we removed much unwanted material which in turn will improve the overall texture of the green as well as help control heavy grain.

 



Back track verti-cutting

Once the clean up of the verti-mow was complete we used a 1 ton roller to smooth out any imperfections on the greens caused by several cultural practices.


 

 

The end result after mow.

While greens are always the top priority, it was not our only focal point for the 9 day closure. As in years past we vertical mowed the fairways.

 

 

 

As a brief wrap up we also aerified roughs, tees, collars, approaches, chipping areas as well as verticut and scalped tees, collars, approaches and chipping areas.

 

And last but not least we did what we call bunker perfection. This process involves checking the depth of the bunker on the face and the bottom pan of the bunker. Where depths are not ideal we moved or added sand to the desired depth.

Please check back in with us soon, as we will post several videos of processes we completed.



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