Pushing Our Greens A Little

We have gotten to a point in the season where the weather is going to allow us to manipulate our greens and firm them up and speed them up as well. Today we sprayed a growth regulator on them to slow the vertical growth and promote lateral growth. This will help get them tighter. We also lowered our height of cut. We didn't lower them much, but it was enough coupled with the growth regulator to notice a difference in green speeds. Depending on how they react, we will probably slightly lower the height of cut again next week. 

In years past we have had to concentrate all of our efforts this time of year to greens recovery and regrowth. With the weather this year and some of the practices we put in place, we have very healthy greens that we can push. This also means a faster recovery from aerification and we will be able to have them rolling faster and playing firmer than years past. Everything is lining up for a great end of summer and an even better fall. Hope to see you on the course soon and often. 

New Twitter Feed

We have a new Twitter feed for our Golf Maintenance Department. If you are on Twitter, you can follow us now. Our Twitter handle is @GNTurf. Social media has become a huge part of the golf industry just like all other industries. I follow a lot of golf industry people and companies and I like to retweet some of their stuff as well as post a lot of the things we are doing on the course along with some of my thoughts. I hope you will follow us and chime in with some tweets of your own. Feel free to tweet any questions or comments. 

Fall Preemergence

It's that time of the year again when you should consider putting down a preemergence for winter weed control. I usually recommend applying a preemergence between August 15th and September 15th. Why such a big gap in dates? Weather dictates everything we do for weed control. If you have had a dry summer I would recommend applying your preemergence more towards the September date, but if you have had a wet summer like we have had this year I would go with the August date. The more rain you have had will more than likely cause early weed germination for winter weeds. Poa is one of the worst possible weeds you can have and it loves cool and wet weather. So stay ahead of those pesky weeds and apply a preemergence for a nice clean lawn all winter long. 

Nematode Sampling

Today we are sampling for nematodes again. We have done this monthly all year. Since our application of Curfew, we have seen our lowest numbers in years. This can also be partly credited to the cooler weather. 

In years past we have had 14-18 greens over the threshold in 1-2 types of nematodes. This year we have only had 1 green over the threshold. Hopefully today's samples will show the same results.