This is something that a lot of people do no appreciate but over winter there is a lot of heavy work using tractors and utility vehicles like what can be found here. Tractors help ground care workers to use heavy machinery that can be used off season. Using heavy grass cutting and grass maintenance machinery in the height of summer would damage delicate grass. This is why we have to scarify, aerate and top dress while the ground is hard and has time to recover.

In this post we’ll look over the three main methods of ground treatment that professional turf care workers undergo during winter.

Aerating the so is a task that is usually done at the coldest point during winter. The reason for this is that it’s a fairly heavy duty task; and therefore should be done at the point where the ground has the most time to recover.

The problem is that aeration and scarification somewhat clash. Aeration is the process of creating holes in the ground to allow air and water to reach the deep ground. Where as scarification is the process of treating the top of the soil to remove dead material and thatch. This can be a hard process to complete if the ground is plastered with holes from your previous aeration efforts. Therefore it’s a bit of a coin flip between the two processes. Quite often there’s not time to scarify & wait for the ground to heal before aerating.

The good news is that scarification can be done with success in the autumn. Therefore if you plan out your work carefully you can complete aeration and scarification with little overlap.

Top dressing is a process that is usually done after both aeration and scarification. It is the spreading of fertilizer over the grass. This helps put rich nutrients and minerals back into the ground after it has been depleted over summer. Summer growth takes a lot of the nutrients out of the grass. Seen as how for aesthetics we remove dead material from turf it leaves a nutrient imbalance. This is why it is essential top artificially top it up with fertiliser.

The take home message is to plan out your groundcare year in advance and stick to it religiously.

It is not an unseen phenomenon; many years have seen flowers blooming as early as February. The natural life cycle of plants is directly tied in with the external environment. The date that they bloom on directly correlates to the ground temperature, rainfall and sunlight levels.

The machines that deal with the early growth season are aerators, scarifiers, top dressers and ride on lawn mowers. All of them serve a purpose in preparing the ground for the main summer season. If the soil is not adequately prepared then growth will be weak, patchy and not as full as it could be.

The first grass cut of the season is usually a rough and ready job just to get the grass growing in a good shape again. Contractors will typically use a rotary lawn mower to undergo the first grass cut in spring. The reasons for this are that the grass will be tough and fibrous after winter, and it will generally be quite unkempt. Therefore using a cylinder mower straight away could cause damage to the blades and machinery.

Looking forward we expect to see the industry seriously picking up around March. Long term forecasts predict a slow rise in temperatures as things get steadily more mild. These are perfect growing conditions and they should see a healthy and problem free spring. In previous years unforeseen snaps of frost have stunted growth rapidly, hopefully that won’t be the case this year.

Trees play an integral part of golf not only in creating obstructions but in generating the ‘mood’ of the course. A large population (or lack of) trees can completely change the way a player has to approach a course. For this reason they have a big impact on people’s playing styles.

The focus on integrating trees into the active management and running of greenskeepers activities will see more collaboration between foresters, arborists, tree surgeons and grounds maintenance staff. This will lead to an overall richer and more enjoyable playing experience for golfers.

The reason why we are taking an all encompassing approach is that we don’t only want to be a new site, but also a valuable instructional resource. Too many sites in this industry are one dimensional and only come with information from a single angle. This leaves readers scrambling around the web to find what they need. We want to be a site where you can leave feeling satisfied and not have to have any unanswered questions. This also goes for commenting on our content. We want to create a community and so actively encourage commenting and expanding the discussion.