Greens Update Pictures

The first picture was taken on the day of aerification (20 days ago) and the second picture was taken 6 days ago. The third picture was taken today. I think the weekend weather did wonders for our healing process.

Greens Update

Since we aerified greens 3 weeks ago, we have been hit with some cold weather. The soil temperatures at 4" deep were about 57 degrees on the day we aerified and that following weekend. We saw a great initial flush of growth and some good healing of the holes because of these temps and the fertilizers we put out. After the temps dropped to some morning lows of around 26 degrees, the 4" soil temp went down into the low 40's. This shut down almost all healing and growth. With the good temperatures of the last 3 days, and the fertilizers we put out in anticipation of these temps, we are finally seeing some more healing of the holes. We will continue to fertilize and mow and roll the greens until they are completely healed in and rolling around 12' again on the stimpmeter. Thanks for your patience in our healing. We can't control Mother Nature. All we can do is roll with the punches she throws at us.

#8 pond overflow fixed

We have repaired the pond drain on #8. We brought in a diver and he got in the drain and cleaned out all of the debris that had it clogged. He used a high pressure hose to free some of the leaves and mud, but he had to pull out a lot of larger debris like limbs and sticks and even a putter. After this was done, we put a 42" pipe over the existing 36" pipe. This allowed us to use this new pipe to set the water level since the top of the old pipe was mangled. We put mud and gravel between the two pipes and put a new cover over the 42" pipe with a new screen on it. This should keep debris out of the drain.

Overflow pipe finished

The pipe on #6 was finished today. Since we went with a brick and concrete structure, we will not have to worry with it rusting in the future. I am very pleased with the finished product. We started filling the pond this afternoon and it should be full in a few days and ready to gobble up some golf balls again.

Overflow Pipe Repair #6

Today Gordon Gresham with GLG Construction started the repair on the rusted out overflow pipe on #6.  As many of you remember, the pipe gave way last fall and caused the pond to drain.  We are now in the process of repairing it.  Gordon and his crew should finish the project tomorrow and we will then start filling the pond.

 This is what the overflow pipe looked like after it rusted out.

 We dug out the old pipe and removed it from the pond

 

Once we found the concrete base for the old pipe, 

we had a good starting point for the new structure

 Here Gordon has poured some fresh concrete to 

level out the bottom of the pad with the outflow pipe.

 A new structure is built by hand laying bricks in a circle around the pipe.

 

Once the bricks are finished, concrete is hand formed around them to stabilize the 

structure and make it water tight.

We will post the finished product once we are done.

Our Aerification Process

We finished up our Spring greens aerification yesterday.  Some people are interested in the process we used, so here are the steps we took to aerify the greens.

The first step is to topdress the greens heavily

This is what the greens look like before aerification

After they are sanded, we aerify the greens

We have Turf Pride boxes that attach to the aerifier.  These drag boxes drag the plugs off of the green and also drag sand into the holes.  The boxes dragging the plugs off save us a ton of labor.  Before getting these drags we had to manually push the plugs off.

Once the plugs are off to the side, they are shoveled into utility vehicles.

You can see how many plugs come out of the green on every pass.  This makes for a couple of long days shoveling plugs.

Once the greens are aerified we blow the remaining sand into the holes.

If the sand is still wet, we have to use our pull behind Buffalo Blower to work the wet sand around on the greens to get the holes filled.

This is our finished product.

Why we aerify

Aerification.  It might as well be a 4 letter word to golfers.  It is even worse to maintenance workers.  But for the greens it is bliss.  The main purpose of aerification is to remove organic material that builds up over time and replace it with fresh sand.  This helps out the greens tremendously, especially in the summer.  When we go through hot wet periods in the summer, the organics in the top inch of the soil act as a sponge and don't allow the water to penetrate to the roots or evaporate to cool the grass.  It just sits there in that top layer and heats up the soil and kills the grass.  When we dilute this organic material with fresh sand we are allowing that water to move on through the soil profile.When the top layer drys out, it allows us to control the amount of water the greens have.  If we can control our water, we stand a lot better chance of keeping the greens healthy throughout the summer. 
Aerifying the greens is a necessary tool in long term greens health.  We know it is a pain for a couple of weeks while the greens are growing back in, but they will be better off in the long run.  Thanks for your understanding in this and we hope to see you back out here soon.

Deep Tine Aerification

We have started our yearly aerification process.  We did not pull a core today; that is next week.  Today we did a deep tine aerification.  With this process, we punch a solid tine about 8" into the greens.  This goes twice as deep as we usually go with our other aerifications throughout the year.  This deep tine helps open channels deeper into the green allowing air and water to penetrate deeper than usual.  It also helps reduce any sub surface soil compaction.  We have done this once a year for the last 3 years and we feel it has been one of the reasons greens conditions have improved over the last 2 summers.  By doing this, along with our other cultural plans we have mapped out for the year, we hope to have an even better year this year.

Irrigation repair

We had to make a mainline repair this week. The pipe was leaking at one of the original gasket fittings where the pipe was put together. When we fixed it, we used ductile iron fittings to ensure the pipe would hold. Since the pipe was a 4" mainline, we didn't want to chance using weaker PVC fittings to hold it. The only thing worse than fixing a leak is having to do it again because the first fix didn't hold. The ductile iron fittings use bolts to tighten the gaskets into the couplings. Hopefully by using these, we won't have to worry about this area leaking again.