Organic Material Removal Prior To Tour Championship

As most of you are aware The Tour Championship presented by Coca-Cola is only a mere 72 days away. East Lake has been closed since the 2nd of July and will reopen on the 11th of July. With a hectic schedule of corporate outings and somewhat ordinary whether conditions for bermuda greens we were planning to aerate the the greens with a 5/8 tine on a 1 1/2" X 1 1/2" spacing followed by the graden contour sand injection unit. The main benefit of this unit is the amount of organic material that it removes in relatively quick time. We used a 1 mm blade and went to a depth of 1 inch on the first direction. We have found it very beneficial to run the machine with the grain as much as possible. The beauty of this machine is that as soon as the grooves have been cut, dried sand flows accurately and fills the grooves before any traffic such as footprints or wheels are able to close the grooves.Unfortunately Mother Nature was not co operating with us and dropped some significant rain on us before we could complete the second direction on the front nine. A big thanks to Harmon Turf Services for their hard work and also The East Lake Agronomy team, as you will notice in some photos there was some extremely long days and long nights to try to finish this process.

This was the first part of our process aerifying the greens.

Same process only with the assistance of some strong movable lights.

Lights are up and everybodys hard at work.

Great shot of 6 green under lights.

On out last green at approx 10:30pm.

First direction of graden with some help from the East Lake caddies.

Graden under lights.

Finishing the chipping green under lights.

Here is the end result of two directions.

Here is all of the organic material removed from the greens.

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