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What turf maintenance and management equipment do I really need?The most important piece of turf maintenance and management equipment you will need is a greens quality reel mower. When I was young, I tried to adjust our family riding mower low enough to cut a putting green in our yard, with the result being a weedy failure. The reason was the mower! Most homeowners today use rotary mowers that have one blade spinning very fast in a horizontal plane. The grass is cut or rather torn due to the high speed and momentum of the mower blade colliding with the grass blade. The problem with these types of mowers is that they cut everything within the blade's radius at the same level, so that bumps will be scalped and depressions will be left long. Rotary mowers can only produce reasonable quality at heights of 1.5 inches and up. The mower that is required for putting greens is a reel mower , which has a cylindrical set of blades that spin against a bedknife. This is actually how the original turf mowers were designed and are still the only way to cut closely mowed turf . The other consideration is the number of blades on the cylinder. For the short heights of cut that putting greens require, you should ideally have 9 to 11 blades. Other important turf maintenance and management equipment or tools would be; a good method of watering the green, ideally an automatic irrigation system; A good quality fertilizer spreader; some method of aerating the green preferably with hollow tines; A hole cutter to move the cups around; golf cups and pins. The local hardware store will usually carry adequate tools for all other maintenance work. Seen enough turf maintenance and management equipment?
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