Course Update 08/29/13

The big story the last couple of weeks has been the heat and humidity.  Overall the golf course has handled the heat very well.  The greens and tees are in very good shape.  The fairways are a little stressed particularly on holes and in areas where large trees are depriving fairway turf of much needed water.  We have been watering a lot however, we have to be careful to avoid disease (which tends to thrive on leaf wetness) and soaking low areas that are not drying out in this humidity.  Once the heat subsides and humidity normalizes the fairways will look much better.

We have been working on some smaller projects and have a couple of updates:

Deep-Needle Tine Update

The greens have healed in nicely from the deep needle-tining that took place on Monday.  The greens are smooth and very few tine holes are visible.   I will update the blog showing the root development within these channels in the upcoming weeks.

 Core aeration of trenches

Tuesday morning we core aerated greens where trenches are located on #4, #9, #12, and #17.  We cored aerated these areas to help level and blend in the sod and plugs.  After we removed the cores we sand topdressed, brushed out the excess sand and over seeded.  These areas are small but we will try to keep the hole locations on these greens far enough away so that it has minimal impact on play.

A couple days after deep-tining and no holes!

Core aerated area on #9 green

 

Sod nursery

This week we have be working near the maintenance facility on the new sod nursery.  Last week the area was rough shaped and the past few days we have been diligently working on fine shaping the sub grade.   The important thing is to remove as many large rocks as possible and smooth out the surface.  To best achieve this we are using a Harley rake to perfect the sub grade.

Early next week we will be installing the irrigation for the nursery.  And next Thursday and Friday we will be adding 90% sand and 10% soil mix to the top 3” to achieve the same soil structure as what is currently on our putting surfaces.   Once the 90/10 mix is leveled  we will be ready for seeding and growing the nursery.

Chris leveling the nursery.

Cart Path Expansion

Last week we added some crushed asphalt to #5/13 tee area.  This area receives a lot of cart traffic and felt it was a good area to expand.   5/13 cart path and the newly added cart path on #13 green need to be leveled, tamped and then seal coated.  We had some issues with our vibratory tamper and are looking to correct 5/13 tee to make it as presentable as #13 green cart path.

Have a great holiday weekend!