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.