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.