Big Changes

As you may have noticed lately, we have a lot of new changes here at the club. ClubCorp has put up lots of new signage and put out lots of information about our new company. If you have any questions or want more info, go to www.clubcorpatlanta.com to see about our new company. We are very excited about all of the new possibilities around the club. 

Moving On

Thursday was the last day of work for our assistant superintendent, Joey Hickok. Joey came to work with us in January of 2013 after earning his bachelors degree.  He had worked a summer with us a few years prior to his graduation, so it was an easy decision for me to hire him. His work ethic stood out to me as one of his biggest assets. He grew and progressed with us over 21 months and became a great assistant superintendent. 

Unfortunately he decided to move to Acworth and when a job presented itself, he needed to take it so he could move. 

The biggest compliments I could give Joey is that I had no worries about the way the course was managed whenever I had to be off property, and Georgia National is a better golf course now than it was 21 months ago because he chose to work here. 

Invasion of the Armyworms!!

We had our first outbreak of the year of Fall Armyworms today. You may have noticed them or their activity in yards recently. It usually starts around tree lines and looks like the grass is dry. If you look closely, you will see the worms eating the grass leaves. 

Here is a full grown Armyworm. They are green and have black stripes and they look like they have a black helmet on. 

If you haven't seen them, you have probably noticed their eggs on anything and everything outside. 

This is their eggs on our flags. They have been evident for a few weeks. The armyworms usually "attack" when we get some cooler nights, like last night. 

Here is the start of their activity on #12. You will notice the grass around the trees looks dryer than the rest of the grass. It isn't dry. That is the start of the armyworm invasion. They will eat an entire hole of rough in a day if they aren't sprayed. 

Here is some severe damage across the cartpath on #4. We will be spraying for them tomorrow with a product called Bifenthrin. They are pretty easy to control as long as you catch them early. 

Tree Removal

Yesterday we had Pro Tree Service come out to the club and remove some dead or harmful trees that we have not been able to get ourselves. They removed 14 trees in all and also ground a few more stumps for us. They did a wonderful job and took great care of the course while they were out there. 

Summer is here.

It appears that the heat and humidity is upon us again. We have gotten all of our fans greased up and ready to turn on. We will be turning them on tomorrow and they will probably run non-stop until after Labor Day. Please don't turn these fans off or push or pull on them. They are set at the right height and angles for maximum benefit for the greens. 

The greens are very healthy right now going into the stressful part of the season. Hopefully we will get a few breaks in the weather throughout the next 3 months to help our greens (and employees) recover from the heat a little. 

Please remember to be courteous to our employees in the afternoons when they are watering greens. It is a quick process to check the green and it only takes a couple of minutes if we have to pull a hose and water some hot spots. Please don't hit into the green when we are checking it or watering. Sometimes we have to jump in front of a group in order to make timely passes and check all of the greens as needed. 

Thanks for your understanding and support. Hopefully we will have a terrific summer. See you on the course. 

Fertilizing The Course

Today we had Harrell's Fertilizer come out and spread fertilizer on the course. We went with their Polyon product this year. They made us a custom blend with an analysis of 24-0-10. We went at a rate of 5.4 lbs per thousand square feet. This gives us a little over 1.25 lbs of nitrogen per thousand square feet. This nitrogen is mostly slow release to give us a consistent feed for about 5 months. The Polyon coating on the fertilizer ensures this slow release. This will keep us from getting big flushes of growth after rain events while maintaining a consistent green color throughout the growing season. We have used this product in the past and we feel it is the best product available. 

Sorry for the absence.

It has been a while since my last blog post. This is not due to a lack of work on the golf course. On 4/4/14, my wife and I welcomed our second child into the world. Bo Carter Brown was born healthy and happy. It has been a terrific 3 weeks. He weighed 7lbs and 14.5 oz. He was 21" long. Everyone is doing great (other than the usual sleep deprevation for mom). 

Time to buckle back down and get to the grind of providing the best course conditions possible. See you on the course. 

What a difference 5 days can make

The picture on the left was taken 5 days ago and the picture on the right was taken 5 minutes ago. Wow, what a difference. Once the temperatures got up into the upper 70's and lower 80's and we got a few straight days of sun, the greens growth has taken off. By the weekend, no one will even know we aerified greens. 

Greens Update

Here is a picture of the greens progress after aerification. The left pic is the day of aerification. The middle is 10 days after. The pic on the right is (yesterday) 16 days after. 

You can tell in the right picture that we have mowed the greens numerous times. The grass has started to grow over the holes. We are pleased with how far along in the healing process we are especially after the cold nights we've had after aerification. 

Dragging, Scalping, and Spraying

This week we have started seeing a lot of green grass popping on our short cut Bermudagrass. We started our spring cultural practices because of this. We started by dragging our fairways with our steel drag. This busted up any rows of clippings and debris from the rains. We followed this by mowing the grass. We are now spraying our short cut Bermudagrass with a liquid fertilizer. This is all quick release nitrogen and it should really help green us up a little better. 

We are also scalping our rough down. We are mowing it at 1" and we will keep it at 1" going into the season for as long as we can. We are going to be spraying a growth regulator in our rough this summer to help us not get behind on mowing it and also to cut back on any clippings. It will also aide in the ball sitting up on the canopy in the rough. 

We hope you come out and enjoy some of the changes that are taking place on the course. Spring has sprung and it is getting more and more beautiful out here by the day. 

Greens 10 days after aerification

We have had some less than ideal weather for our greens health after aerification. We got off to a good start with perfect weather and rain the day after we finished. After that, the sun went away. Yesterday and today and tomorrow will really help with our healing process. Here is a picture of the day of aerification and yesterday side by side. The holes are starting to heal over and the grass has grown up through the sand. 

Another Greens Aerification Finished

We have officially finished another aerification on the greens. This year we did not do a double aerification. This gave us a lot cleaner look to our aerification. We started by punching the greens with a 1/2" inside diameter hollow tine. After the greens were punched and the plugs were collected we had to blow some of the debris out of the holes. 

This gave us a good clean surface with a lot of open channels for the fresh sand to fill. 

We then topdressed the greens with some fresh sand. 

After the sand was down, we drug it into the holes using our pull behind drag which left us with this look. 

After we finished on Tuesday, we got a good rain event over night that worked the sand in even better. Sometimes we get lucky with the weather and this was definitely  one of those times. 

Over the next few days, we will be rolling and dragging sand on the greens numerous times. We are expecting more rain over the weekend which will only help more in the healing process. 

Thank you for your understanding as this process is one that everyone (especially the maintenance crew) hates, but it is one of the most important processes for greens health and longevity. 

Hope to see you on the course soon. 

Fresh Mulch

Over the last few weeks, we have been putting down fresh premium red oak mulch around the course. This year we have expanded some of the mulch beds. Most of the beds are the same, but we had to expand a few due to the shade over the years leaving some of the edges of the beds with no grass. Now, instead of grass, these areas are roots and dirt. We wanted to put mulch in these areas because mulch will be a better playing surface than a dirt hard pan with roots. 

You will notice some of the mulch is lighter than the rest. This is all the same mulch, but the lighter stuff has not aged as long. 

Feeding the greens

Today we put out two granular products on our greens. We put out a K Mag product with an analysis of 0-0-22. It has Potassium and Magnesium. Our soil tests show we are deficient in these two nutrients, so we will be applying this product quite a bit this year. The other product we put out was a 14-28-10 fertilizer. We like this product because of the good shot of nitrogen and phosphorus and it also has a good shot of micronutrients. We like to go out the week ahead of aerification and give the greens a good hit of fertilizer to get them growing. This seems to help them recover a little faster. 

Pre/post emerge update.

We started our pre and post emerge spray last week. We finished on Thursday. We are already seeing results in some of the first areas we sprayed. The post emerge product (glyphosate) we added in with our pre emerge is already working on some of the poa. 

This is a healthy poa plant that is growing in one of the areas we sprayed last. Notice the healthy green leaves. 

This is a poa plant that is in one of the areas we sprayed first. If you notice, the leaves have started to turn yellow. This will continue until the plant is dead. 

The rapid response we are seeing is very encouraging. We had perfect weather for the weeds to take up the Glyphosate while the Bermuda stayed dormant and wasn't affected. 

All in all we feel very pleased with our application and hopefully the pre emerge product we put out will allow you to have a weed free course throughout the summer. 

Time to put out pre emergent weed control

It's that time of year to put out your pre emergent weed control for the summer. There are different choices that you can use. We have changed ours this year from what we have been using for the last several years. This is always a good idea to rotate different chemicals throughout the years. If you don't, the weeds will develop a resistance to the chemical. 

We are using two different chemicals this year. We are using Ronstar in some of our weaker turf areas and on tee boxes because it is safer on these areas and will allow the turf to fill in throughout the growing months while still providing excellent weed control. The second chemical we are using everywhere else is Specticle. This is a newer chemistry that is one of the best preemmerges on the market. Since we had more weeds than usual last year, we spent a little more money this year and beefed up our program.

Another thing we are doing is adding a Glyphosate (active ingredient in Round Up) product in with our chemical. This is going to clean up any weeds that have germinated over the winter due to the extremely wet weather we have had. Since it has been so cold, the Bermuda grass is completely dormant and this will not harm it. 

We feel this will provide us with a relatively weed free golf course for the summer.