| The
Single Most Important Thing You Can Do For Your Turf |
| April
13 , 2007 -- Issue 7 |
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| Better
Fields for Better Play |
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Core
Aerify
Aerification is the most important turf maintenance practice. It helps
loosen compacted soils so air and water can get to your root zone.
The holes left by a core aerator can be filled in with the topdressing,
seed, and fertilizer in other turf maintenance steps. Aerification
alone is still a big plus for your turf.
Tips
and hints for the job
- It is best
to run an aerator in an X pattern across your turf.
It takes about 30 minutes to do this in one direction on a full size
baseball infield. So if you can get two players and two aerators,
you can do the X pattern in 30 minutes.
- I prefer the
walk-behind machines that mechanically drive the
tines into the ground. This approach provides a more even distribution
of aeration and allows the depth of the tines to remain constant.
- Don't
remove the core plugs.
Let them dry out.
They'll get ground up when mowing and slowly dissolve back into
the subsurface as a type of topdressing.
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Be
careful in the heat.
Aerating lets air in and moisture out. If you're going to aerate
on a hot day, be sure to run the sprinklers earlier in the day and
be prepared to run them mid day to keep the grass from drying out.
I aerated once in August on a 95 degree day.
It's surprising how fast the grass dries out. You're trying to improve
it, not kill it.
- When
to aerate? I do this preseason (early February) mid
season (late April or early May) and late in the fall (October or
November).
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