Venting Greens

From time to time, you may observe our staff performing a process called "venting" on our greens this summer.  Just like you and I, the greens need to breathe and the venting process is a way for us to get oxygen back into the soil profile and promote healthy gas exchange between the soil and the atmosphere.  In order to produce tournament-caliber green speeds we have to subject the greens to a lot of mechanical traffic with our mowing and rolling equipment.  Combined with heavy foot traffic from golfers, this creates compaction and can over time, seal off the surfaces and create an unhealthy anerobic environment for the turfgrass. 

The imapct on the playability of the greens surface with the venting process is very different than the traditional "aerification" process that we peform ever Spring and Fall.  During the traditional process, we remove a 5/8" core and topdress heavily with sand which makes the green bumpy. 

The difference with the venting process is that we use a solid tine comparable to the size of a pencil that does not remove any material from the green.  Many of you won't even notice that we have done the process because once we run our greens roller over the surface, any visual evidence of the holes disappears and the surface rolls just as true as it did before.  That's it.  Nothing to it!  Here are some pictures to illustrate:



Running the pencil tines over the green with our aerifier.



On the left, is what the green looks like right after it is vented.  On the right is what it looks like after we rolled the green after venting.  You can't even tell we did anything.

 

Here is a picture of an aerification hole that we found in our soil profile.  The Area between the red lines is a channel from the aerification process last Spring.  You can see that the roots in this area are bright white, healthy and happy.  This shows how important oxygen is to the roots of our greens.