GOLF COURSE MANAGEMENT

Turf Talk - Groovin' on the greens

A It's a complete, self-propelled verticutter with a Honda engine and an Australian pedigree. Its fans include Milt Engelke, Ph.D., and Joe Duich, Ph.D. - breeders of popular, competing bentgrasses - who often disagree on turfgrass management strategies.

"It's a good tool," Engelke said at a seed company field day seminar in South Carolina this spring. Duich like-wise praised it a few days earlier at another seed company's field day.

The Graden verticutter features 15 circular blades spaced at 1 inch, with eight tungsten tips each. The blades cut grooves in the turf as deep as 1.75 inches as the machine moves forward on its powered wheels. The blades counter-rotate - that is, they rotate the opposite direction of the drive wheels. Thatch, stolons and other organic materials rise in the machine's wake, opening up the turf for topdressing, seeding or other operations.

For factory owners Clare and Graham Dryden of Melbourne, Australia, turf equipment manufacturing began as a sideline in 1990. Their city council was frustrated by the poor, compacted condition of the municipal cricket wickets - the area where most of the footwork occurs in the game of cricket. Meanwhile, the Drydens' engineering factory was struggling to keep busy because of an economic slowdown.

To keep workers on board, the company engineered an aggressive ground groover to cut through the hard layers of the cricket playing fields and sold the machines to the city council. Soon the Drydens were exporting their product to India, China, Singapore, Malaysia and New Zealand. After modifying the product slightly for the softer surfaces of golf greens, they attended the GCSAA International Golf Course Conference and Show four times, and found many buyers in the Carolinas, although few superintendents in other parts of the United States have discovered the product.

"The main thing we're hearing is they're using it on the new varieties of bentgrass," Graham Dryden says. He hopes to refine the product more, expanding its season of use beyond the milder months so superintendents can fight thatch on the new cultivars during warm weather as well. "If we had a thinner blade, then they could get out in the summer with it," Dryden says.

Fred Biggers, CGCS, how at the Wintergreen Resort in Virginia, worked at South Carolina's Greenville Country Club back in 1996 when he first laid eyes on the Graden verticutter. He bought one off the trade show floor and used it to reconnect old deep-tine aerification holes to the surface of his greens by grooving through accumulated material. According to Biggers, the result was reduced thatch and faster healing of new aerification holes.

"It seemed to encourage lateral growth of stolons to fill in the holes more quickly," Biggers says. He adds that the grooves took a little longer to disappear, but topdressing and rolling ensured that putts rolled smoothly until regrowth was done.