(Grass) Growing Pains

Maybe it was the late opening or maybe it's that the grass is still growing like crazy, but the start to the 2013 golf season has been exceptionally busy.  It's almost as if we've been squeezing six weeks of work into a three-week timeframe, but we are glad that reinforcements (in the form of summer employees) have begun arriving.  Overall, we are very happy with the course conditions, and we'll be even happier when the last of the winter damage finally heals in.  Last week, we expedited the recovery process by transplanting healthy plugs from the chipping green into some of the more concentrated areas of injury.  The good news is that the affected spots have been largely filling in with creeping bentgrass, which should help in future winters.

Otherwise, the big news of the spring has been the decommisioning of the hillside lift that has been transporting golfers from the 9th green to the 10th tee for decades.  To say that this saga has been a nightmare for Chad and me would be an understatement, and although there will be no lift in the immediate future, we are at least relieved to be moving forward.  We are going to act as quickly as possible to remove the exisiting lift and to get the old track line paved.

Last week, you may have noticed that we removed a couple of trees.  The old shagbark hickory that has affected many shots on the right side of hole four had been rapidly declining over the past few years, and this year, it only had two branches that were still alive.  We will be planting two trees--a maple and an oak--in its place.  The other tree that we took down was a medium-sized ash tree between holes 12 and 13.  This ash tree had very quickly developed a large split and was an imminent safety hazard.  Our resident nurseryman, Howard, has selected an elm as the replacement tree for this site.

Speaking of trees, we occassionally discuss the competing impacts that they have on the health of our turf, and nowhere is this more true than on our ninth green.  We will oftentimes find small tree roots when moving the hole location on this green, but the root (pictured below) that Omar discovered while repairing the back left sprinkler takes the grand prize to date.

Aside from the morning shade issues and the shelf of rocks that the ninth green is built on, these tree roots are one of the reasons why this green is our most finicky.  Two trees to the left of the green are on the chopping block, and we hope to have them removed in the near future.

It looks as if it's going to be a tumultuous week of weather, and 0.85" of rain has already fallen this morning.  But, we hope that you are able to dodge the rain clouds and get some golf in this week.  It's hard to believe that June is just a few days away...
  

 

Busy Weeks

The past two weeks have been a blur, but we've been able to accomplish a lot on the golf course.  This week's accomplishments include fertilizing the greens and tees and aerifying the fairways, and on this cold, rainy day, we can exhale.

Fairway aerification went very well, and the delayed spring actually helped us out tremendously.  Without leaves on the trees, the aerification cores that were pulled on the back 9 dried relatively quickly and evenly, and we were able to grind them up with very little soil left behind.  Usually, the tree leaves keep the cores on the south sides from fully drying and that was not the case this year.  We were also fairly fortunate to dodge the showers on Monday, and the dry, windy conditions made for perfect core grinding and blowing.  The front 9 fairways were solid-tine aerified for the first time ever, and because this process doesn't bring up any soil, it's almost hard to tell that anything was done to them.  Next year, our plans are to solid tine the back 9 and hollow tine the front 9.

In the coming weeks, we will use small diameter, solid tines to aerify the greens.  We used these once or twice during the season last year, and after rolling the greens, you will hardly notice that that we did anything.  This year, our normal greens core aerification is scheduled to begin on September 29.

Last week, the hillside between holes 14 and 15 dried out enough that we were able to remove the enormous oak tree that toppled over earlier this spring.  Almost all of this tree's major roots were rotten, and the inside of the first three feet of the trunk also had a two-foot diameter section of decay.  From our best estimation (the rings were rather close together), the tree was 130 years old.

With the warmer weather, the greens that suffered winter damage are healing by the day, and we are happy with the progress that they are making.  We will continue to monitor them and take any action necessary to get them fully-healed as quickly as possibly.  Chad dusted off the slit seeder this week and dropped bentgrass seed in the fairway areas that suffered winter injury and these areas will disappear as the soil temperatures allow the already-present Poa annua seeds and newly-added bentgrass seeds to germinate.  Chad also seeded any thin rough areas this week.

All told, it has been a very productive few weeks, and before long, our summer seasonal workers will begin filtering in and the real chaos will begin.