Patience!

 

The crazy weather has finally allowed us to do the necessary winter aeration on the greens this week.  We planned on doing it a week ago and had topdressed the greens, however the soil was so frozen we could not get the deep tine to penetrate the ground.  After the rain Sunday and Monday we were able to get out and do all the greens without any damage.  This aeration helps prevent any water sitting on the greens from freezing during flash freeze events.  

10 Completed

 

The 2 fairway bunkers were removed on the right side of 10 and replaced with classical mounding for strategy and aesthetics.  

Making Progress

 

Classical mounding will replace bunkers throughout the golf course.  Here #4 is the first taste of more to come.

Refresh Is Underway!

 2025 will be a busy year at Arcola with the golf course renovation and new irrigation installation beginning in September.  Under the guidance of Andy Staples, our staff is undertaking some projects to help keep the project within budget and to give the members a taste of what Andy is looking to do throughout the course.  This is similar to what we did this past spring with the new tees on 7 and the ditch on 6 fairway.  Andy has identified bunkers we will eliminate and replace with mounding on several holes and below you will see the bunker on 15 is being eliminated and the bunker on 4 is being replaced with "Travis Style" mounds.  These mounds will add some challenge and visual references from the tee.

Club Championship Commitment

 You know we pride ourselves in providing tournament conditions each and every day.  Since aeration in August, it has been a big push to get the greens to perform as they normally do throughout the year.  We needed to get aeration holes to fill, greens to firm up and speeds to return to normal.  While the weather has been near perfect and dry of late, my staff is the key reason the course plays the way it does.  

My staff are often in well before sunrise and gone before most golfers tee off in the morning.  The past two weekends we brought in more staff than normal to ensure the fairways, greens and bunkers were as good as possible. I believe everyone who played will agree that "the greens were back" as they were firm and fast again.  That happens with the help of everyone on my team for weeks and months on end.  A big thank you to them as the 2024 season is now starting to wind down.

Localized Dry Spot

 

You would probably be surprised that the driest area on this fairway is right next to the sprinkler heads on 4 fairway and others.  The reason is when we aerate with the tractor, we lift up around the heads so we do not damage them, often times missing a few feet around each head.  Over time, thatch builds up and water cannot penetrate to the roots.

Here you will see we went out and hand aerified around every fairway head to ensure we can lessen this problem.  Of course next year we will have a new irrigation system and most likely the heads will not be in the same location as they are now so we will be starting all over again in another year or two.

How Long Does Aeration Recovery Really Take?

 Aeration is the most vital thing we do to our turf each year as it has multiple benefits, most of which allow us to provide tournament conditions on a daily basis.  However, the question that is baffling is how long does aeration recovery really take?

Do we base it on not seeing holes on the greens anymore?  In that case, it would probably take up to 6 weeks for full recovery without seeing a single hole.

Firmness is out the window for a few weeks as we have pulled a lot of cores out of the greens and they are quite unstable until they fully knit in.

Do we base it on green speeds?  A big part of it is based on speed and actually not seeing the ball hop on putts, meaning how true and smooth are the greens.

Here is the dilemma when we aerate greens.  From the second we finish cleaning plugs off greens, the focus is to get the holes to fill in as soon as possible.  That means topdressing greens to ensure holes are filled, fertilizing and also watering more frequently.  Weather plays a huge part of recovery, but we can artificially create growth if need be.  The most painful part is the first mowings after aeration.   The sand ruins mowers for a good 7-10 days after we start mowing as we are only picking up sand and not mowing grass due to dull blades.  

Once we start seeing grass in the mower baskets and holes filling in, we start to apply growth regulators since the greens are pretty juiced up with fertilizer.  The growth regulators to some regard will slow the recovery down and sometimes we have to get aggressive with growth regulators due to the amount of water and fertilizers we apply.  Now that recovery is slowing, we apply more nutrients to help speed it up, all the while trying to produce good playing conditions.  It is like running into a wall over and over again.  

The smaller the hole we make on the green, the faster it will heal, but the less we are improving the green.  The idea is once we are given the ok to aerate, lets get the most out of it and punch as many holes and get as much sand into the green profile as possible.  So this year we verticut, aerated and dryjected.  A lot of sand went in the green and a lot of surface disruption.  

  Here is a picture of 15 green today, 22 days after Dryject was completed.  I would say this green is almost healed but lets look closely.  The green lines you see are tire marks that are fractionally lower than the rest of the green.  Once we pull cores the greens are really soft and once we drive equipment over it after (sprayers, topdressers or dryject machines), the tires leave subtle indentations that effect ball roll to some degree.  Not noticeable to the eye but on the stimpmeter it matters.  Regardless of how much we roll, they are still slightly depressed.  The solution;  topdress and brush it in so it levels them out.  That brings us back to square one where the mowers will be affected, the speeds will then be affected and it adds another few days to recovery.  So really, how long does aeration recovery really take?

If It Aint Broke....

 

You know the old saying, "if it aint broke, dont fix it".  A lot of this pertains to maintaining a golf course.  Sometimes we have perfect weather years and the course looks great and we will do the same thing the following year since it worked before.  No two years are a like and what may have worked before, may not work this go round.

Take our approaches for instance.  They have been mowed by hand for years and always looked great.  However, we could never get them to firm up like our greens.  A big part of it is our inability to dial in watering on our approaches, whatever the surround head hits or the fairway head hits and that is it.  We also need to add some drainage too and continue to aggressively remove thatch.  But one thing that was simple was the hand mowers.  They are very light and often times the operator will allow the machine to bounce and hop around, not giving us a tight or consistent cut.  Yes, there are complaints that our approaches are too tight and we have slightly raised heights.  What if we took a fairway mower, put a solid roller on it to lessen wear from turning in tight areas and put a good operator on it.   After a few days of finding a good way to mow them, we have now embarked on this practice.  The fairways look much tighter even though they are higher than before.  Also, the weight of the mower will hopefully help firm up approaches in the long run.  Of course we will monitor this and if we start to see wear we will adjust on the fly or simply go back to hand mowing.  In the meantime, we have seen an improvement in firmness and need 1 less employee now to do approaches.

Aeration Progress

 

This was 10 green on Tuesday afternoon.  Wednesday we had dryject come in and do a sand injection application on the green.  We pulled a lot of organic matter out on this one application.

Here is the same green on Tuesday morning, 6 days after our dryject application and final cleanup.  The priority now is closing holes up quickly and then we will worry about getting good mowers out to get quality cuts.

Lightning Strike

 

This large white oak to the right of the 9th tees and fairway was hit by lightning last week.  While the tree is still viable now, next year it will probably not leaf out again.  We are only a month or two before leaves will be changing and dropping so it will be difficult to know if it is dead or not, but based on other strikes, it will be dead.  You can see on the bark where the strike occurred high up in the canopy and traveled into the root system below the ground.  This tree is not a key tree or provide any strategic value to the hole but it is another nice tree on our property that will have to be removed.  

We all see the maple on the right side of 18 that was significantly damaged a month ago during a thunderstorm.  This tree will have to be removed this winter for safety reasons and we will consult with Andy Staples on a replacement plan for it as this tree did provide some strategic value to the 18th hole.

Starting to Prepare for the Renovation

 

The crew is starting to remove the sod from old 7 tee now that we are not using the par 3 anymore.  This is pure bentgrass that we will use throughout the course.  This large tee area will now become our new green nursery using our aeration plugs next week from the greens.  This will be beneficial when we do green expansions or make new greens bigger than the current greens.

Where Andy Staples widened our fairways we were able to scalp down our existing rough and start converting to bentgrass with herbicides, seeding and topdressing.  Here you see where much of the expansion is Kentucky Bluegrass, this will not transition to fairway grass properly and is thinning out due to the low mowing heights.  We are stripping this area out and using the sod from old 7 tee to get it to match better.  We are doing this on holes 10 and 13 also.  

The Practice Area is For Practicing

 

This is normally something we see on a Monday outing when they play scrambles.  Unfortunately, this is becoming more common Tue-Sun on the course as well.  This was Friday afternoon, after my staff just filled all fairway divots for the weekend.  Not only will this be visible all weekend, there is a good chance a members ball could land in one of these.  My staff will normally fill divots one to two days a week depending on outings.  To help protect the course, please replace your divots and only practice on the driving range.  

Wildflowers Adding Some Benefit

 

The area left of the driveway has been a natural area for many years.  We decided this past winter to add some interest and benefit to it.  I seeded in wildflowers after removing the vegetation.  The picture below does not do it justice but the colors are striking.  This year annuals will dominate the area and perennials will follow.  We will have to add more annual seed next year to keep the interest up most of the season.  The only non wildflower plants in the meadow are milkweed, which are beneficial to monarch butterflies and produce a flower as well.  In order to remove the milkweed either by picking or spraying, we would have to walk through the area, damaging or killing flowers.  Better to leave it be.

Fairway Expansions

 

Under the guidance of Andy Staples, we began adding our fairway expansions in now, a year before the renovation of the golf course begins.  Originally, we were going to move fairway sod around or purchase new sod, but by doing this now, we have a good 18 months to get the new fairway expansions to match up to our original fairway lines.  Above you will see how we scalped the rough down, verticut and topdressed, sprayed out the rough grasses and in only 2.5 months, we are already looking pretty good.  Doing it this way also saved us almost $100,000 vs buying or moving sod.

Aeration Done Early and With Little Disruption

 Nobody likes aeration, the necessary evil in fine turf management.  However it is vital in providing optimum playing conditions, which we strive for on a daily basis and the members expect on a daily basis.  Drill and fill is disruptive but key in drainage.  We were fortunate that Double D was able to move up our date due to inclement weather in the future and my staff once again killed it.  Lugging sand to the machines for 10 hours straight so we can get it done in one day and the members can get on the course the next day.

Starting under the lights at 6am.

A deep tine on top of the drill and fill to improve drainage even more.

24 hours later....Like nothing happened.  Members will have great greens to putt on Easter weekend.  

7 Tees Making Progress

 

The 7th tees have been under construction for about a week and a half.  The mission is to enlarge all the tees to improve turf quality and to address drainage issues around the tee.  By the end of next week, we should have the majority of the work done and are on schedule to have the tees ready for play by late April or early May.  We have doubled the sizes of the white and blue tees and this will pay dividends in the future.  All of this is being done in house under the guidance of Andy Staples.

Native Area Facelift

 

The natural area left of the driveway as you come up is getting a much needed facelift.  We do little maintenance to this area as a native area and it is unsightly.  We are going to take a section and rototill, remove the fescue and other grasses and plant wildflowers.  This meadow will be attractive and also act as a pollinator area.  If this is successful we may look to expand it next year.  Remember, the first year annuals in the seed mix will bloom and then perennials will take over each year after.

Mole Damage 12 Green

 Over the past 3 weeks we have noticed a mole actively burrowing across 12 green.  We rolled out the damage and had not seen any until yesterday.  Despite traps, he managed to get across the green twice in the past day.  The war is on!

Get The Buck Out of Here!

 

Our new Leyland Cypress screening hedge by 13 tees has been under attack by bucks trying to rub their antlers on them.  Several have broken branches and are starting to look sparse.  We installed 200 feet of wire fencing around the hedge to deter them from doing any further damage.  Lets hope it works!