Course Update after Aerification

All I can say is that every three days it rains here! We are a bit behind schedule but we are making headway with some of our spring programs. We have completed our rough pre-emerge and have headed into fertilizing our fairways. You also may have noticed edges along the cart path that have been removed. We are prepping these areas for sod, generally it is the traffic areas along with some unwanted grasses. We will start sodding on Monday so play these areas as ground under repair. With the new temporary bathrooms located on #14 we are pouring a concrete pad and will be landscaping Friday morning, this project should be done by Friday afternoon.

We are in our home stretch as it
pertains to prepping the course, such as mulch and weed control with a few other odds and ends. Greens and tees are on pace to heal very rapidly and will get better daily. Completing the aerification last week now gives us the time to start working on our details!

Greens Aerification Update

With the recent weather that we have been having in the past few weeks, mother nature has not been so kind. Because of the heavy rain we had over the weekend followed by the start of our greens aerification it has made it extremely difficult to clean up the greens. And to top that all off, the sun has not been out very much. Dry soils and sun are the key ingredient to accomplishing our goals efficiently. But we can not wait around and we keep pushing on. We now have resorted to blasting water down on the green to clear the holes. This will allow the green to accept the top dressing sand that we are going to put down.We are starting our tee aerification today and will proceed to go backwards starting on #18, I hope to have this completed by the end of the week and top dressed, if the weather cooperates. As for the greens our goals is to have them finished by today if not mid day on Thursday.

Fairway Deep Tine and Rough Aerification

Here is a few pictures of the fairway deep tine and our rough aerification program for the spring. The fairway deep tine is a slow process but the results are worth the wait. With increased rooting, improved drainage and the typical de-compaction this really serves as a valuable tool for our fairway program. We aim to go down at least 6 inches or deeper if the machine will let us. This all depends on the fairway that we are on of course. For some reason the #1 fairway feels like there is a sheet of rock under neath and only allows us to go no more than 4 inches.

Now for the muddy part of the aerification is our roughs. The process is to aerify then drag behind once the cores are dry. The trick is the cores need to be dry, with the rains that we are getting here every couple of days it makes for a long process to fully clean up. Some areas need to be raked by hand but rest assured we will have everything cleaned up as quick as we can. We thank you for your patience. One last thing that we have added to the rough process is top dressing. Yes just as we would top dress the fairways, we are doing the same to the rough. I have stock piled all of our contaminated bunker sand just for this purpose. Currently we have aerified up to #12 and includes #18. With rain expected tomorrow!

#13 Walk Path

As we have done in the past we have moved the walk paths on every hole to better align them to the fairway. Our last walk path to finish was done on #13. Because we added walk paths between the Tees in the last couple of years it was necessary to move the existing one to match up. It is an easy process but very labor intensive. We physically go in and cut out the walk path then cut out the rough and swap them out. The reason we do this because there is rye grass in the existing walk path that if left and mowed at rough height we would see a green strip from the color differences that rye grass has compared to tall fescue (the dominate rough grass).