2nd Green Progress

While it is not 100% healed, the 2nd green has come a long way in the past 9 days.  I figure in another few weeks it should be back to normal.  Lucky for us this is our only really bad spot on the course and to think how long it took for it to recover would have been a tough pill to swallow if we had it on a lot of greens.

Welcome to Arcola Kramer

Kramer, pictured right is our new 11 week old Border Collie.  His big sister Newman will show him the ropes of chasing geese.  Newman will turn 1 in June and has done an admirable job keeping the geese away.

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.