All Good Things Must Come To An End

Wednesday, July 1st, marks my official last day at Georgia National. In case you have not heard, I have accepted the superintendent position at Healy Point Country Club in Macon. 

I have very mixed emotions about this move. On one hand I am super excited about my new opportunity in Macon. I am moving to a great Country Club with a great golf course. The staff and membership there are awesome. On the other hand, I am leaving a golf course that I have poured my life into for the last five and a half years. 

Georgia National was my first superintendent job on bentgrass greens. It was the course where I was working when both of my children were born (luckily I wasn't working while they were being born). Georgia National will always hold a special place in my heart. 

I have seen a lot of great things happen at Georgia National while I was here. There have been a lot of struggles over the years, but there have been some really great times as well. 

While I was here I have had the opportunity to work with some great people. Terry O'Leary gave me a shot as his assistant and I am truly thankful for that. I learned a great deal from him during our time at the Nat together.  I have had three assistants in my time as superintendent and they were all great guys. I never had to worry about leaving the course in their hands. But, the true backbone of the golf course is the maintenance staff. The super and assistant can plot and plan all they want to, but it takes a great team to execute the plan. I believe we have always had a great team. Even when some of the guys left, someone else always seemed to step up. Every compliment I have ever gotten on course conditions should have gone to the crew and I always tried to give them all of the credit. 

The membership at Georgia National has always been very supportive of me as well. I truly appreciate you all standing behind me even when things went a little sideways every now and then. We always seemed to make it through and you all always seemed to understand. Thank you all for that. That makes our job easier when we have a supportive membership. 

I have truly enjoyed my time here as assistant and superintendent. I always think a great measuring stick of a superintendent is at the end of the day asking if the course is better than when you started. I can't say whether Georgia National is a better course today than it was when I started, but I can say without a doubt I am a better superintendent today than I was when I started. That is all because of a great membership, leadership team, and most of all the best maintenance staff I could ever ask for. 

Thank you and I will miss you all. 

The Reinvention is Underway

The clubhouse reinvention started last week at Georgia National. The inside bathrooms have been gutted and are awaiting all new insides. The company moved on today and started work on the media wall. Once we are complete, it should give us a real WOW factor in our clubhouse. 

Heavy rains and flooding

Over the last week we have had a little over 4" of rain. On Sunday we had 1.2" and it was heavy. With the ground being fully saturated, this rain didn't have anywhere to go. Here are a few pictures from around the course on Sunday afternoon. 

When the bottom on #8 flooded, it washed out a section of cart path. There is a pipe problem and we have had someone out to look at it. As soon as we can get some help from Mother Nature, we are going to get the pipe and path replaced. 

Getting Aggressive On Greens

Today we continued our recovery process from aerification. After we aerify, the grass blades tend to get fat and lay over. We got aggressive today and started curing this. We mowed greens this morning. Then we lightly topdressed to help them get back to smooth and firm. After our topdressing, we verticut the greens in 2 directions. This helped to stand up the leaf blades that were laying over. 

It also helped work that sand down into the canopy. Then we brushed the greens to finish working the sand into the canopy and stand the leaf blades straight up. 

Tomorrow we will mow again and then spray our growth regulator on the greens to help slow the vertical growth. 

Here was our finished product today after a little water. 

Another Successful Aerification

We finished aerifying our greens this week. We timed it perfect with the weather by getting some good rain today after we wrapped up all of the topdressing and dragging of the sand. Hopefully this process will set us up for another good year on the greens. Here's to good weather to heal them up and get them firm and fast again in no time. 

We started out by punching the greens. 

Then we lined up the blowers to clean the debris from the top of the surface and out of the holes to maximize the amount of new sand we could get back into the holes. 

Here is a section that is in the process of being blown clean. 

Then we topdressed the greens and drug the sand in. 

Here is the finished product. We punched a lot of holes and put a lot of new sand back into the greens. All in all, it was a very successful process. 

Time To Punch The Greens...

Well, it's that time again. Time to aerify greens. This is a process that no one hates worse than the golf maintenance staff, but it is something that MUST be done. Here is a link to an article that explains it a little better. 

http://golf.about.com/od/golfcourses/a/aerification.htm

We are starting the process Monday after lunch on the front side and hopefully we will be done aerifying, sanding, dragging sand, cleaning, and fertilizing before the rain moves in on Thursday. This would be great timing. 

Plugging Out Poa

With Bentgrass greens, one of the worst weeds to have a problem with is Poa Annua (Annual Bluegrass). There is not a cost effective chemical control on the market for removing Poa from Bentgrass. For this reason, we have to remove it as we spot it or it will spread quickly and be an even larger problem. 

I like to pick it out if we catch it small enough, or plug it out if it is too large to pick. Here are some pictures of each way. 

We had to remove a few spots today from #1 green. With aerification coming up next week, we wanted to remove it to keep from transplanting it in other areas of the green with the aerifier. 

We like to dot it with paint to count how many plugs we will need. 

One of these spots was small enough to pick out with a pocket knife. There are still several larger spots that will have to be plugged in this area. 

After it is out, we mend the edges like a big ball mark and topdress with sand. 

Here is a larger spot that had to be plugged out with our hex plugger. 

When picking or plugging, the main thing is to get all of the poa. Here is the new plug from our nursery green that replaced the poa infested plug. We topdressed it with green sand to help with the healing process. 

Mulching the course

We are in the process of mulching all of our beds on the course. We do this around this time of year and then touch them up throughout the year as needed. This is a timely process as we go out and repaint all of the bed edges and then edge them with our bed edger to give them a clean edge to work off of. Then we mulch the area. We are about half way done with the mulching. 

Out With The Old, In With The New(er)

Today we said goodbye to our old cart fleet. We got a fleet of 2013 Club Cars. This is a huge upgrade for us. The suspension on these is a lot better than ours that we just got rid of. This should make for a more enjoyable round of golf. Come on out and take advantage of all of the new happenings at the club. 

Willow Tree Gone

We had to take down the Willow behind 13 green today. It died last year. We have started taking down dead trees that we marked last year. This will be the most noticeable one that we are taking down. We are also limbing up a lot of trees and starting to put out fresh mulch. 

Swampy Conditions

It is still raining. We have gotten in a cycle over the last few weeks where it seems we have rain every few days. The golf course is fully saturated and it is down right flooded. Georgia National usually drains and dries up relatively quickly, but with all of the rain and cold weather, we haven't had a chance to dry up and therefore we have been limited in any maintenance on the course. As soon as it dries up enough, we will be back out there cleaning up and getting the course back in tip top shape. If you do come out in the meantime, PLEASE keep the carts on the paths. 

Stay warm and dry. 

Pre and Post Emergent Spray Kicking In

We started our pre and post emergent spray 10 days ago. We are seeing some results of the glyphosate product that we sprayed. Here is a Poa Annua plant that was not sprayed before the picture was taken. 

Here is another Poa Annua plant that was sprayed 7 days before this picture was taken. Notice the shriveled up leaves and the yellowing of the plant. 

This last picture is a little hard to see, but here is one of our largest patches of Poa Annua on the course. This area is in front of #8 green. You can see the right half of this patch was sprayed 10 days ago and is almost completely yellowed out and dead. The left half was sprayed today. The reason for splitting the patch is because it is right on the edge of our tree line where we had to spray Ronstar instead of Specticle for turf health reasons (see previous blog post). And it is also good to have a check plot to see if your chemicals are actually working. 

We will wrap up our spraying tomorrow. 

Time To Pre Emerge Again

It's that time of year to put out your pre emergent weed control for the summer. Over the last few days, in between all of the wind, we have started spraying the course. There are different chemical choices that you can use. We have decided to use the same chemicals we used last year. We had excellent results last year with our weed control, so we decided not to change anything. 

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 other product we are using is Specticle. It is a great pre emerge for all types of weeds. We sprayed it last year at this time and we feel like we got pre emergent weed control all the way through the fall and into the winter. Everywhere we sprayed Specticle, we didn't have a single bit of Poa Annua germinate this fall. This is a great product. 

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. 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. 

New Fountain

On Wednesday we installed our new fountain in the pond on #10. We felt this would have a big impact from the course as well as from the clubhouse. We went with the Otterbine fountain with the Tri-star pattern. We feel it turned out very good. It has an LED light kit, so it is also very nice at night. We hope you enjoy it. 

Winter Has Arrived

So far this winter hasn't been very harsh. Well, that all changed yesterday. We had a low temperature yesterday of 9 degrees. We reached a high of 31 degrees. This morning got down to 14 degrees. This has allowed all of our Bermudagrass to go completely dormant. Now would be a great time to spray roundup on any weeds you have in your Bermudagrass. It will kill the green weeds, but won't harm your lawn. 

Have a good weekend and stay warm.