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.