DryJect Demo--Changing Perceptions about Aerification

It's time to talk about aerification again.  Don't panic we are not going to aerify the greens again this year but we are already discussing the aerification timing and process for next year.  As I have said before, aerification is a "necessary evil" but if we can find techniques and processes that will provide our greens with the cultivation management needed but will be less disruptive to the putting surface and require less time to recover then we will investigate that process.

On Friday we saw a demonstration of a "new" technique known as DryJect from Chad Gamble owner of DryJect of Tennessee.  The DryJect process is unique from traditional core aerification in that it uses high pressure water injectors to incorporate sand or amendments directly into the putting green profile.  This is different from core aerification where sand and/or amendments are placed on top of the green and every attempt is made to drag/brush/broom the sand down into the holes, which honestly is nearly impossible to accomplish.

This illustration shows how the DryJect process works to make for a better aerification process with little to no disruption to the putting green surface while at the same time completely filling the soil with sand or amendments and fracturing the subsurface of the green to provide greater movement of air, water, and roots.  The DryJect process is better for the soil also because compared to normal core aerification it does not "glaze" the side of the core hole which limits where air, water, and roots can penetrate.

Here is a link to a very informative video made by a good friend of mine, Mark Langner, Director of Agronomy at Pursell Farms in Alabama made the DryJect process and why it is beneficial.

The Unique Process of DryJecting at Pursell Farms

This is a photo of the demo area on the putting green on Friday following a pushbroom brushing and a rolling.  The spacing on the DryJect in this area was spaced at 3" x 3" and placed the sand/amendment to a depth of at least 6" deep, leaving a hole on the putting surface close to 3/8" in size.  Once broomed and rolled we were very impressed with how firm and smooth the area was and Robin and Mr. Nixon had no issues with putting quality.

Here is a photo of the same area on Saturday morning after the area had an irrigation cycle applied to it and had been mowed.  Even though you could tell that something had been done to the area it was drastically different in both firmness and smoothness from what one would expect to experience following a normal core aerification.

As we look ahead to next year we hope to continue our pursuit of providing you with a high quality golf course from putting green to fairway to bunker.  Each improvement we make to our maintenance program and practices helps us to achieve our goal of being among the best golf courses around and somewhere everyone will want to play.  We hope we can include the unique DryJect process into those programs and reduce our need to aerify the greens so aggressively or as often.  A "win-win" for everyone.

Tennessee Wild Side Video of Earth Day Event

Earth Day at Harrison Bay State Park Golf Course

It seems like a year ago since we had our Earth Day Event at Harrison Bay but Ken Tucker and his staff at Tennessee Wild Side have put together a video of the day's events that I wanted to share.

The event was a great success and we had the opportunity to renew many friendships while at the same time striking up new ones.  Being able to join with CNN, We Are Golf, GCSAAtv, TurfNet, Superintendent Magazine, Golfdom, and Golf Digest, just to name a few, to get the word out that golf courses are not environmental polluters but can provide much needed habitat for wildlife and filter air and water pollutants was amazing.

 I have to take this opportunity to again thank Jacobsen Turf for envisioning and sponsoring the event and most especially Mr. David Withers, Jacobsen president, for making special arrangements to fly in for just a couple hours to join in the festivities and also to present us with our Golf Environment Organization certification. 

Maintaining the Native Areas on the Course

Whether you love, like, or hate the naturalized areas on our golf course, they play an instrumental role in the our appearance and environmental success.  Many golf courses choose not to have naturalized areas on their property and those reasons could be limited space, desired look, desires of membership, or simply a lack of environmental interest.  For us though the naturalized areas provide movement corridors and nesting habitat for the wildlife that call Harrison Bay home, they filter fertilizer and pesticide residue before it can enter the surrounding waterways, and it reduces the amount of labor and water used to maintain these areas.

Naturalized areas are not intended to penalize the golfer and they do not indicate that the Agronomy Staff are lazy and don't want to maintain these areas, they are there for a reason and have been selected to enhance the golf course appearance and function.  While these areas are "low maintenance" they are not "no maintenance".  This week Mitch will be working to cut these areas down and get them prepared for fall.  It is a long process and with over 50 acres of naturalized areas it will take all week to get accomplished.

So how do naturalized areas help the environment? Well, as you may know our golf course is on a peninsula which is surrounded on three sides by the Tennessee River.  In order to ensure we do not contaminate the public waterway with any chemical, pesticide, or soil runoff or residue we maintain a vegetative buffer strip around the entire property.  This buffer strip extends 10-25 feet from the waterway into the golf course property.  This buffer strips acts as a filter to collect and trap pesticide residue as well as soil and grass clippings.  It also helps to protect the structure of the lake bank so that it does not degrade and fall off into the lake.

This photo is a prime example of what can happen if the vegetation at the waters edge is highly maintained and not allowed to grow to a proper height.  As you can see the soil on the lake bank is readily washed off into the lake, the structural integrity of the bank has been weakened and has begun to recede, and the water temperature along the shoreline is increased significantly reducing the survival rate of small water creatures such as frogs and salamanders.  The increased temperature of this shore transition area makes travel and egg laying in these areas nearly impossible.

Removing these areas from our weekly maintenance program where they would be mowed and irrigated on a routine basis is saving us a lot of money and resources.  Not maintaining these 50+ acres on a weekly basis means we save close to 700 gallons of diesel fuel per year and save close to 260 manhours per mowing season which can be spent elsewhere. As for irrigation savings we have calculated that we are eliminating close to 7.4 million gallons of water which would have to be applied to these areas during the normal 26 week mowing season that we have at Harrison Bay.  Big savings no matter how you look at it, for us and the environment.

Which ever look you like, the grown up look or this after it has been maintained, we hope you look at these areas as beneficial to the golf course and the environment and understand why we have these areas.  It is not because we are lazy and don't want to mow more grass and it is not because we want to make your round more difficult.  Every practice and program done on our course has a reason and I hope you better understand the reason behind the naturalized areas.

Happy Ball Hawking to everyone who will be searching through these areas trying to retrieve "their" wayward shots.

August aerification is in the books

Monday and Tuesday once again marked that time that superintendents and golfers have a "Love/Hate Relationship" with.  I'm talking about aerification of the golf course, especially the greens.  Although it is a necessary evil to maintain healthy turf, aerification is a tremendous amount of work on the golf course staff and drastically increases the stress level of being a golf course superintendent.  We are given only a few days a year to undo the damage, compaction, and wear and tear that occur the other 360+ days...so when we are closed for aerification, we do as much as we can to improve the golf course.

As we are not afraid to try new techniques that we believe will improve the playing conditions of the course, we borrowed a process from our friends at East Lake Golf Club and moved our verticutting practices of the greens to the back of the show. Normally we verticut first but this year we decided to wait until after the greens had been aerified.  Once the cores had sufficient time to dry they were drug with a drag mat and we verticut on top of that surface.

Our greens are over 10 years old and during that time we have not been overly aggressive with them in the sense of removing thatch from the greens properly.  Well that all ended this year.  In an effort to return our greens to the extremely high caliber they were several years ago we got aggressive and removed a ton of unneeded material.  I have to admit it was very scary to see the greens "ripped up" like they were but I am very confident they will recover quickly and be some of the best available.            

Here is a link to a short Vine video to the process

While we all know the greens are the most important we took the time to verticut the tee boxes as well.  Verticutting the tees will remove the unwanted thatch, or dead/dying plant material, which makes the tees soft, spongy, and susceptible to disease as seen on the blue tee on #3 recently.  This process has needed to be done for years and we will be putting it into our monthly arsenal of projects from here on out.

Not so the fairways would feel left out and more than anything because they needed it, we also took the time to verticut the fairways during the closure.  It was amazing the amount of material that was removed from the playing surface during this process and will go along way to making our fairways stronger and healthier, all in an effort to reduce/eliminate the effects of a harsh winter like this past one, if it happens again.  Making sure our turfgrass is healthy and prepared for the long dormant winter months will help ensure we have a great playing surface in the spring.







Another practice that we got to do while closed was the topdressing of the tee boxes.  We routinely spot dress divots on the tees but have not had (or taken) the opportunity to topdress the entire teeing surface before. This process, in conjunction with the verticutting and aerifying, will help to smooth the tee boxes out and make the plants much healthier.

Once again, not so the fairways would feel left out, we have begun the process of topdressing the fairways as well.  If you played over the past couple of days you have seen a sand layer on a couple of the holes each day.  We are only able to topdress a couple holes per day due to the fact that we are having to use our greens topdresser to do the job and it does not have the capacity of a large area material handler which would be able to cover 4-5 times the area with a single load.  Hopefully we can show over time the benefits of having a sound fairway topdressing program and we can purchase a machine of this type.

As if aerification and verticutting of the greens, along with verticutting and topdressing of tees and fairways, was not enough to put on our plate this week we also worked on repairing some of the bunkers which have been neglected for far too long. The crew have added new sand to several of the bunkers on the course and it will take time for this sand to become packed and firm so please be patient.

Like I said in the previous blog post, our golf course maintenance staff works extremely hard to provide you with the best course possible.  We don't have all the tools and gadgets that some of the bigger, better financed courses have but we make up for it with creativity, desire, and hard work.  This photo was taken today, four days following one of the most aggressive cultivation practices that we have ever done to our greens.  I am pleasantly surprised by how well the greens handled all the different abuse they were placed under.  Our greens were healthier going into this aerification than they were in June so I feel very confident they will be back better than ever shortly.

Course Improvements--Recent and Future

As always the golf course maintenance staff at Harrison Bay has been hard at work over the past few weeks.  The renovations to the golf course have made it all the better and with our second greens aerification of the year coming up next week there will be even more improvements made to the course.


 The chipping/nursery green is coming along on schedule. We have had some set backs due to the cloudy weather and the fact that the green is very lacking in organic matter in the soil which means it does not hold water or nutrients readily but we have been "babying" it and are stating to get well defined roots and the grass is beginning to spread quickly.  If we get the good weather they are forecasting over the next few weeks I feel confident that we will be ready to open the area for practice by the end of the month.

Willie is mowing the new zoysia tee on #9 at 12:45 PM
Notice the amount of shade still on the tee.

The white tee on #9 that was resodded a couple of weeks ago has rooted down and has been opened for play.  This tee was built several years ago, moving the original tee from an area closer to the cart path to its current location due to the heavy shade created by the trees near the tee box.  Moving the tee did not help the poor turf conditions caused by the small area, the excessive use, and the inability of the 419 bermudagrass to deal with the amount of shade.  This time when we regrassed the tee we chose to use zoysia grass which is more tolerant to the shade.  It does not have the recuperative ability that 419 does but hopefully will be able to survive in the shade better.  It will require more care and we may occasionally have to move the white tees back up to the forward tee if the traffic becomes too heavy.

For several years I have been wanting to start a vertical mowing program for the tees, approaches, and fairways and this week we began by doing the tee boxes.  This process removes unwanted growth and thatch by slicing into the turfgrass surface and cutting the plant vertically.  Following this process we came back with a regular cut with our tee mowers and then blew off all the chaff.  This practice will make the tees firmer and healthier and will allow for easier incorporation of topdressing sand which will happen over the next week.

As I said earlier we will be conducing our second aerification of the year this upcoming week so the course will be closed on Monday and Tuesday. We have heard many compliments on the greens lately which is nice to hear but we have also heard the question of "Why do you have to tear them up when they are so good?"  That is a fair question.  If we want to continue to have good greens then we have to do the maintenance on them to keep them that way.  Aerification is a vital process to the health and survival of our greens.  It removes old, dying plant material, increases the exchange of gases from the soil and the atmosphere, increases the infiltration rate of surface water, and relieves compaction caused by golfer and maintenance traffic.  It will be a temporary set back and with the greens being as healthy as they are now I expect a quick recovery.

Bill Greene preparing for fairway verticutting

While we are closed we will also be attending to the verticutting practice on the fairways and approaches.  We will be applying topdressing to the tees and approaches and will be aerifying the sod that was laid in the fairways back in June to help with drainage, rooting, and to help level/smooth these areas out.  We will also be adding sand to many of the green side bunkers and preparing them for play.

Your golf course maintenance staff is always busy, working hard and trying to improve your golf course.  I consider myself very fortunate to have a staff as committed and dedicated to the course as I do, so if you see them on the course, say "Thanks" and let them know you appreciate all they do for you.