Llanerch Golf Course and External Activities

As we continue to heal from aerification, the staff is rolling the greens with more frequency to try to smooth out the putting surface. It also helps us provide a cleaner cut. With all the recent sunshine, we have seen the greens begin to heal quicker. 

We have just finished the aerification of the greens, approaches and tees. The course will be open today at 8:00am. The size of the holes on the greens are medium in size and already healing. We will be aerifying the fairways in the first week of November.

Yesterday's aerification went as well as could be planned. Today, we have spent time spreading more sand on the greens to smooth them out. This picture was taken right after we applied topdress. The sand was then blown into the aerification hole and into the grass canopy. This will make the greens heal faster and putt better. The hole size is only half the size that we use in the fall.

After a very sunny and dry weekend, we have decided to aerify greens. The aerification holes are very small and should heal rather quickly. The holes in the greens will help with water movement to the root zone, increase the amount of oxygen in the soil profile and assist in getting more sand in the ground.

Today, we started our late summer aerification of greens, tees and approaches. So far, we are on schedule. We will be adding sand and fertilizer to them tomorrow to speed up the healing process.

We have finished aerifying fairways today.  We have some topdressing still to do on approaches and need to add some more fertilizer on greens tomorrow. That being all said, we are ahead of schedule enough that we are opening tomorrow at 11:00am with carts. Thanks for your patience.

Any Golf Course Superintendent will tell you they prefer to aerify when its warm and dry. Well, today is very very dry! It puts in a position where we have to use more water than normal. As for warm....well its warm plus plus! We are already 88 degrees and approaching 90 before the end of the afternoon. We just have to adjust the amount of sand we use. So far, everything is going as planned. We will open the practice putting greens tomorrow. The range and practice are open today.

We started aerifying greens today. The holes are about "medium" in size. Over today and tomorrow, we will roll, topdress and broom the greens. Are goal is to fill in as many holes as possible to the surface. The more we can do that, the fast the greens heal. Tomorrow, we are slated to start aerifying the tees and approaches.

As you can see from this picture, we have begun to aerify greens today. We are using a 1/2 inch sized coring tine. I would characterize it as leaving a medium sized hole. We are adding sand to the greens to fill the holes. The sand helps water movement and speeds up the healing time. We should be reopened for golf by 8:00am on Thursday. Thanks for your patience. 

Yesterday, we were able to accomplish aerifying all the greens and most of the fairways. We used a 3/4 inch solid tines on greens that went 7-9 inches deep into the soil. This assists drainage, gaseous exchange and promotes root growth. We added dry topdress sand to the greens to fill the holes. We also rolled the greens to smooth out the surface.  The fairways were aerified with a 3/4 inch solid tine. We will start topdressing fairways today and throughout next week. The course is open for play today at 12:00pm.

The course has received way too much rain last night and today to aerify. We are rescheduling the aerification for next Monday and Tuesday. The good news is the course will be open the rest of this week. The bad news is the course will be closed next Tuesday. We are hoping (and expecting) next week will be dry.

Depending on the weather and the golf schedule, we aerify the greens, tees and fairways in late March and in late September. The whole process takes us roughly three to four days. The aerification holes require about 14 days to heal. The enclosed video goes into much more depth on "why" aerification is needed.