The editorial team of www.topdressing.biz has found an excellent article on aeration and topdressing strategy written by: Jim Puhalla is president of Sportscape International of Boardman, Ohio, and Dallas. He is co-author with Mississippi State University professors Dr. Jeff Krans and Dr. Michael Goatley (who also supplied information for this article) of a forthcoming book, Sports Fields: A Manual for Design, Construction and Maintenance, to be published by Ann Arbor Press Inc., Chelsea, Michigan.
Concepts:
aeration, soil, topdressing, core, turf, compaction, materials, equipment, water, thatch, surface disruption, tines, root systems, sports fields, aerification.
Summary:
Two of the most useful turf-care practices in the field manager's toolbox are aeration and topdressing.But the increasing variety of equipment and materials requires more decisions than ever before.On one hand, you have more options for providing exactly the treatment your turf needs.On the other hand, making incorrect choices can reduce the effectiveness of your work.Compaction can be a particular problem on sports turf, because of the amount of foot traffic that results from its use as a playing surface.When the soil becomes compacted, turf root systems can't get the oxygen they need, and the soil becomes a barrier to root penetration.For warm-season fields, the best time to aerate is late spring through late summer.Aerating after that time is risky, because the turf may not have time to recover before cold weather brings the risk of winter cold injury.For cool-season fields, the grass is most active in May and September, so those are the best months for aerating.The freezing and thawing of water in the holes will fracture the soil even deeper and wider than usual, and will provide improved relief from compaction.Time your core aeration around your most important sporting events, because the holes can catch players' spikes, and the dried cores can disrupt the roll of a ball.You can coordinate nutrient applications with aeration to help get the materials directly into the soil.In the past, there were questions about the wisdom of performing core Aerification following pre-emergence herbicide applications, and particularly about whether or not the herbicide barrier is broken by Aerification.Heavily used sports fields that do not get regular core aeration usually have very little turf.Core aeration provides the longest-term improvements in air and water infiltration, percolation rates and healthier root systems.However, there are two side-effects of core aeration which must be remembered: surface disruption and core litter.For most sports field aeration, standard units do the job effectively, but more compacted or poorly percolating fields may need larger, longer tines.Solid tines are usually selected because of the limited surface disruption they cause, but they also provide other benefits.Solid-tine aeration is also commonly called "shatter core" aeration, because the solid tines cause a "quaking" action that can fracture subsurface compaction zones -- especially with a deep-tine (up to 12-inch) aerator.Spiking and slicing can also sever the lateral stems of bermudagrass, bluegrass and bentgrass to encourage lateral root growth and thicken the turf.Done correctly, this technique can level uneven surfaces, enhance the soil for better drainage and rooting, control thatch, and assist in seeding operations.To amend heavy soils (soils having a large percentage of silt and clay) use a uniform sand with most of the particle sizes in the coarse range (between 0.5 and 1.0 mm).
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