Hi. My name is Terry Crawford, I'm the Golf
Course Manager at Clandeboye Golf Club. It's a 36 hole parkland course in Bangor in
County Down. Today we're going to talk a little bit about aeration on our golf greens
called the Dryject it actually forces water into the root zone through our irrigation
system through the Dryject machine which you'll see later on. We use pure sand, washed sand,
because we try to use the best quality sand to go through the machine, because
it has to go through little fine jets. What we do first, we've verti drained the
greens with a machine called the verti drainer, and it has 12 mil tines to – and it goes down
to a depth of nine to ten inches with a slight heave, not a lot of heave slight heave the heave
actually on the verti drainer actually when the tines go down it actually throws a kick at the
bottom and then and fragments the the root zone a lot underneath so you don't really see what the
machine is doing on the surface – but it's doing a lot of work, a lot of creating a lot of fractures
underneath the soil for the roots to move through.
We were just trying to talk about a
little bit about the reason why we use a high quality sand and a
lot of sand, a volume of sand. What we're trying to achieve
here on the golf greens is put a minimum of 30 to 40 ton of
sand on these hectare of greens. The reason why I've introduced this Dryject
to Northern Ireland – and I'm the first to use it – because I want to get the sand into the root
zone. Yes, spreading on the top definitely helps to level the surfaces, and I feel with this machine
it puts the sand in where you require it. It helps for the, puts columns of sand in
probably about six mil maybe eight mil width down to six to eight inches of
high quality sand so that's the reason why we're I'm using this machine on
these golf greens at the moment.
Hi, my name is Ken Siems, I'm a former Golf
course Manager, I've been in the business now for over 45 years started on the Golf
Course when i was 15 in Toronto, worked all over the world now I've worked in Canada,
United States, I've worked in Duba, China, Russia and Scotland – which is, which is home.
So Dryject is a is a company based out of Philadelphia Pennsylvania in the United
States, and they've been in business for over I believe over 14 years now, and the principle
of the machine is very simple.
It injects water basically a liquid solid tine, and then sand
follows in from the vacuum created by the water, and it gets pulled in behind the water blast – so
I'll just show you through the machine the sand flows down through these through these tubes,
these are the water injector manifold here water gets blasted down and then the sand gets
pulled in behind the machine.
Over on this side here this is basically a giant power washer
that you could probably find this motor on most big industrial type power washing machines, and it,
it forces the water down. I've got 16 injectors and that's pretty much how the, this area
here this is where the sand goes in. I just want to talk a little bit about the sand.
As you can see, we're down in our fifth green it's a par three we're just using the dry jet at the
moment. Ii just wanted to talk a little bit about the sand and the name of the sand and the quality
of the sand and the reason why we use this sand. This is a HS Masters it's actually a a
pit sand and it's been washed and screened twice, a double wash because we wanted to get as
as much silt out of the sand as we possibly can. If you use the wrong sand in your lawn- or a golf
green – with too much silt in it, the silt then washes off and actually builds up a sediment which
seals your, any pore spacing that you might have.
so somebody tries to sell you some cheap
sand – really first of all rub it in your hands. When you're rubbing your hands see how dirty
your hands are, if your hands are very dirty you know there's a lot of silt in it.
Don't use it on your lawns or your garden. Yeah I just want to try to talk a little bit about
the two procedures, a lawn care procedure, and a maintenance procedure on golf greens.
They're
actually carried out the same procedure as hollow tining or solid tining or verti draining.
These are all things that relieve compaction in your lawns leaf, relieve compaction in a golf green.
We would have thousands and thousands of people over these golf greens. Everybody starts off on
the tee, and move out to a fairway, but everything finishes off inside a six feet radius around
the golf hole to finish out when they putt out. In your garden, you wouldn't have that sort of foot
traffic at any time, or heavy machinery on that but a lot of people ask me, do you put, apply
sand on your, onto your garden? There is times you might do that if you want to try to fix the soil
texture, maybe try to add a little bit of sand if you've clay soil, or, but really on a golf green
sand is only put in for drainage purposes.
Yes it holds open the the soil beneath because sand
there's nothing in sand that's why we would use other products like seaweed products
soil conditioners. Again we don't want to mix up to too much between one comparison and
another they both need sand at certain times. If your lawn was very wet you might introduce sand
sand to dry it out, but try to broadcast a lot of sand over your lawn to try to improve
it, it's not going to really do any good.
Again, we're on our 13th green down here. I would
like to explain we did a video this time last year regarding grading on the greens. The
grading was a completely different technique than what we're trying to do now the reason why
we're doing this dry jetting on these greens because we've got irrigation on our Dufferin Course
with no irrigation on our Ava Course and that's why we do the grading. Irrigation means
we have a pipe system from our pop-up heads to the machine which brings the pressure of water
to the machine but on Ava Course we haven't got any water supply at all so that's the reason why
we do grading.
Grading is heavy duty scarification and then we would seed under that, we clean that
out, blow it and clean it out , and then we seed into that and then we'd do a top dressing on
top of that. Again, we would do verti draining prior to that so we'd verti drain, deep scarifying
which was called grading, sand and seeding a light fertilizer application, and then we just roll it
all in and that's the job done on our Ava Course. <RobbIe> " If you'd explain what verti cutting is, if you'd
explain what scarifying is, and then grading for …" > Yeah, verdi cutting is just, it's a vertical
blade that just cut any lateral growth, horizontal growth, moving across, that just
keeps the grass, your grass standing upright. Scarification is a deeper scarifying just
below the surface, removing any, any dead grass roots, any dirt or leaves, anything at all has blown
onto your greens and built up over the the season.
Grading ends down to. well we can go down to 18 to
20 mil. Some people go down to 25 mil but I prefer just to we or problems in our greens 18 to 20. So
we do an 18 to 20 ml with the three mil tine, and it's a power take off which, with one
small tractor on a hydraulics end pto driven. It's a great machine for the job,
but as I say there's verti cut, scarifying, and grading three different
things for three different procedures but you need them all to make sure you can get
the greens and your lawns in good condition. 13th green on the Dufferin
We're just matting in the sand now. You can see with a bit of excess sand on the top. That's actually quite good for us now so because
we've also verti drained, and the excess sand now will go into the verti drain holes – but once the
sand has been matted in with Philip, here my assistant, we'll then just give the greens then
a roll, and that'll be opened then immediately tomorrow for play.
This is just one application of
top dressing now, and it has really filled in the holes very very well. Golfers could come out now
immediately and really putt over that without any, any problem – and they'd be happy with that.
Normally if you were doing a hollow tining process on golf greens you would be probably
looking for at least a week if not two weeks of recovery. This is just recovery in the next
probably three or four days, and we're back into good greens again for the Membership.
What we get out of it outweighs the expense. Return to golf very quickly, sand – it's below the top
surface in the root zone where we require it. and just as quickness of
play and to return to golf.