On Monday, we had the crew from Harmon Turf come out to demo their Graden Sand Injection units. Last July, we used their Graden units with 3 mm blades at a 1/2 inch depth. We did this two different directions, directly behind a 5/8" coring aerification. This year we are looking at using either a 2 mm blade, one direction. Or a 1 mm blade two directions. We will still do a 5/8" core aerification prior to the Graden process. We will not have to fill in the holes post verification, since the Graden process will fill them in. We decided to go forward with a 1 mm blade, two directions. This will give us around 7.86% surface disruption. Together with our aerification, we should achieve around 27.49% surface disruption. We will go two directions, since as the Miniverde is healing, it will not affect the roll of the ball, by getting caught between the slits from the Graden units.
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This is the Graden Sand injection unit. If you look above the wording "Graden," you can
see the sand flowing down into the slits. The piles of material are organic matter
that have been brought up to the surface. This unit was at a depth of an inch. |
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Here you can see the amount of organic matter this process brings out of the profile. The brushes are rubber. They spin
in reverse, pushing the material out of the way. A crew member comes behind and picks up the material with a plastic shovel. Since the brushes are rubber, they don't damage the turf.
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Here is the organic matter that was removed from this process. You can see the long, fat blades of turf,
as well as sand and soil.
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This is what the finished product looks like. This has been brushed, blown off, and swept off with a Sweep-n-Fill brush. Notice that we did not aerify this green, since it was only a demo. We will aerify all greens prior to doing
this process. |
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