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.