Topdress Before the Heavy Rains

We topdressed and aerified fairways again before the heavy rain was coming in today.  On some fairways, this is our third application of sand already.  We also aerified and dryjected greens and topdressed them as well, so this rain will help wash in all the sand and nutrients.  This is our last disruptive process to greens this spring and we will do our normal venting every 2 weeks throughout the season starting in late May.

2nd green progress

More progress on 2nd green recovery.  These pictures are 4 days apart and we will now stop covering the green at night and continue to promote recovery.

Baby Steps on #2

The top picture is the 2nd green this past Monday.  The bottom picture is the same green this morning.  In 4 days, we have seen significant improvement and we have had frost every night, cold temps during the day and snow on Wednesday.  All that considered we are seeing improvement and with the warm weather coming this weekend, we should see more recovery.  We will continue to leave the cover on at night and we will skip a few mowings each week as well.  We will also skip our second seed head spray.  The best thing to help this green recover will be patience.  We will have it back to normal in a few weeks but we need to give it time as we know spring weather can be unpredictable.  We know the drainage is poor so we know what we need to do in the future to prevent this from happening again.

Fairway Drainage Starting on 3rd Hole

It will take about 2 weeks to get the fairway drainage done on the 3rd fairway depending on the weather.  This is one of our wetter fairways after rain events and will improve once the drainage is completed.

Winter Damage to 2nd Green

As you can see from the picture, the water sits in this location and with the freezing and thawing, the plants in the area are stunted and in some cases dead.  We already see recovery starting and it will take a good 4-6 weeks for this area to fully recover.  We did clean snow and ice off of the majority of our greens back in late February and they are all fine, but here we know water sits all the time and it is probably weak poa that thinned out.  This is the main reason why XGD is needed in our greens moving forward.

18 Tees Being Sodded Today

We are hoping to have the new tees open in 2-3 weeks.

Dryject on Greens Today

Lets hope the rain holds off until we finish the greens today.  This is the final step of our 1st April aerification.  We will be doing this all again on April 28th in preparation for the upcoming season.

Snow Mold in Roughs

The prolonged snow cover this past winter, and no fungicide applications and north facing slopes has led to a substantial amount of snow mold in our roughs, most notably our bentgrass and poa roughs.  This will grow out with warm weather and is more unsightly than anything.  Once we eliminate these poor roughs with our renovation in the future, the problem will lessen or disappear altogether.

Replacing Sand in Newer Bunkers

The newer bunkers we constructed last year are getting new sand.  While we liked the bunker sand we originally installed, it dried to quickly leading to plugged balls and a lot of maintenance to try to eliminate the problem.  We found a new sand last fall that we used on our last 5 holes that the membership liked and we will now use this sand moving forward.
The old bunker sand is being reused as a fairway topdressing so it is not being wasted.  This spring we will be putting about 350 tons of sand on our fairways, including the approximate 100 tons we removed from the bunkers as our fairway topdressing and replaced bunker sand are almost identical in texture and size.

Greens Aerification Underway

Greens aerification has begun and we are being aggressive this spring with our busy golf schedule this season.  We are using 3/4" tines on the deep tiner and 5/8" tines on the standard aerifier and then following it up this Monday with a dryject application.  All in all we will have put almost 100 tons of sand on the greens this spring.  We will deep tine again and dryject again on April 27th.