Friday, October 5, 2012

Fairway seeding and upcoming maintenance

Fairway Seeding

This summer was very hot and extremely dry; our fine turf areas did very well despite the weather.  However there are a couple of exceptions on some small areas of our fairways where some turf thinned out and died. This week we slit-seeded these areas with bentgrass, topdressed with sand, and used covers to quicken the germination process.   These areas are small and are found on #1, #6, #9, #14, and #18. The picture below shows the final product.  Please do not hit off of the covers, they are marked as ground under repair. Thanks.
#1 after it has been
seeded, fertilized, topdressed,
and covered.
Chipping Green

With the chipping green closed for the season we took the opportunity to aggressively verti-cut, seed, topdress, water, and cover the entire complex to allow for faster recovery.  We will keep these covers on all fall and most likely when we open next spring.


Range Tee

Next week we will be working on the range tee so it can be ready for next season. We close the range tee this time year to allow it to heal in for next year’s play.  If we continued to hit off of the tee, most of the divots generated in October and November would not recover until late next spring. 

Next week we will be deep-tining, heavily over seeding, fertilizing, topdresssing and covering the range tee so that it will be in good shape for next season.

#13
The large depressions behind and to the south of #13 will be filled in with soil and seeded in the upcoming weeks.  Since we have a shortage of soil on the property, we will use plugs from our fairway aerification.

Depression on #13
Filled with plugs from aerification.
Naturalized Areas
In the closing weeks of the 2012 golf season we will be mowing down the natural “fescue” areas found throughout the course.  By mowing these areas we keep out larger weeds, shrubs and trees from taking over the fescue grass that was planted.  These areas have come a long way and should be greatly improved next season.  Natural areas while not maintenance free, do cut down on rough mowing and add texture to the golfing landscape.

Natural Area on #12

 
Small Improvements

In the coming weeks we will be adding some more mulch to bare areas just at the end of cart paths.  So far this has worked well and looks much nicer than it did previously.  Also we will be adding some more rock barriers to the edges of our cart paths to keep traffic from trampling turf.  We have recieved some nice comments on the rocks and we hope to slowly incorporate more from now until next season.    











Fairway Aerification Update

So far tee and fairway aerfication has been great!  The nice dry weather has allowed us to get a lot accomplished. To date almost all of the fairways and tees are completed except #2 and all par 3 holes.  The holes that are completed look very clean and in most cases almost completely healed in already.  If the weather cooperates and our equipment continues to hold up we should get done by early next week.  


Taken from #3 fwy
day of aerification

#12 Fwy one week after aerification.