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.