Graden Groundhog Demostration

In the last blogpost Graden Contour Sand Injection demonstration we showed one of the many tools that are available to the golf course industry to help maintain greens properly and help to provide conditions that golfers demand. Although the Graden CSI did a wonderful job in removing the unwanted organic matter in the top inch of the greens there was a great amount of material to clean up.  Sometimes that is the biggest issue with doing cultural practices...cleaning up the mess that we create.

Another machine that was demoed was the Graden Groundhog material removal machine.  This machine is a self contained debris cleaning machine.  It has brushes and paddles inside which sweep the generated material into a hopper which can then be raised and dumped into a waiting vehicle or piled up on the side of the green to be picked up later.

Above is a video of the Groundhog clearing the material generated from the Graden CSI.

Once the material is cleared from the greens surface it can then be easily lifted above a vehicle to take the material away from the greens area.

Here is the area of the putting green after the groundhog has been over it.  Very little material left on the surface which will only require a little blowing.  The Groundhog during the demo had the brushes set just a touch too low and pulled some of the sand out of the grooves but since it is adjustable I believe I could set it to leave some more of the sand on the surface to help with leaving a smoother, less disrupted surface.

Here is the area after it was cleaned up and blown off.  The amount of material removed by the Groundhog was impressive and the fact that it would have taken agronomy staff members so much longer to pick up the debris is even more important.  This small demonstration area was nice to do but I know if we had to do all the course it would go much faster and be less back breaking on the crew if one had a machine such as this to help.  Again thanks to Michael Crawford of Redemix Turf Products for the demonstration.