Bunker Strategies

 

The new bunker styles have been met with overwhelming approval from the membership.  The maintenance on the other hand will need to be tweaked.  It has been a learning curve for our staff dealing with an engineered sand and a concrete liner.  Our old bunkers were firm 90% of the time, especially after rain events.  The new bunkers are softer more frequent and if they are firm, it only lasts for a day or so.  This is a combination of faster draining liners, more coarse sand and the weather.  

When rain does not frequently occur, we have to rely on irrigation to help add moisture to the sand.  Depending on time of year, we try to avoid any unnecessary watering.  We do not have dedicated bunker irrigation but we do have green perimeter and surround heads.  Running these, will help the bunkers but soften the surrounds.  Again, a learning curve.

Recently we replaced our metal spring leaf rakes with a hard plastic leaf rake.  We cut off the end tines on each side and have noticed a big improvement.  Less troughs through the bunkers and we actually flip the rake upside down to do the edges.  When it is wet, we can return to the metal leaf rakes, but for now it seems these rakes are doing the trick.

Of course it is up to the individual to do it properly as well, so it is not a perfect solution yet, but we are heading in the right direction.

Fairway Conversion Continues

 This is the new portion of our 9th fairway.  It was scalped down 14 months ago and managed at fairway height since.  There are growing pains associated with doing this, including having the grass get acclimated to the new heights, getting rid of undesirable grasses, having the grass survive hot and wet stretches and finally aerifying and topdressing these new pieces so they match the existing fairway.  The latter will take years to catch up as this area was rough that never received aeration or topdressing or any other significant cultural practices.  The key now is to remove the unwanted rough grasses.  We could not do this during the summer as our fear was having no grass in these areas so we applied an herbicide 2 weeks ago.  You can now see where some of the grasses are affected by the spray and we are hoping our overseeding will help fill in the stressed turf areas.  By next summer these expansions will look and match much better, however we will still need to baby them along for another season.