18 Coming Along

Despite the weather, we are making progress on 18.  The staff will be laying sod today, tomorrow and Monday and most of the 18th fairway area will be covered for the winter.  The tees are still too soft to even attempt to start to shape them in so we will have to be patient until ground conditions improve.

Mad Rush

It will be all hands on deck today as we race against Mother Nature again.  Trying to get the new fairway expansion sodded, temporary drains in the new fairway bunkers and then tarp the bunkers so we can continue to work on them once the rain passes.  We still have to rebuild the tee complex and put the irrigation back on the left side of the hole and sod everything so we will have our hands full the next few weeks.

Putting Green Work

We are putting the Graden sand injector verticutter across the new practice green today.  When the new putting green was sodded back in May, it had a clay layer in the sod that we have to remove via aerification and other means.  The green was aerified on October 24th, now we are passing the Graden over it to put slits into the clay layer and inject sand.  This along with aerification needs to be done several times a year to this green until we can reduce the layer or else the green will begin to seal off.

Drainage Paying Dividends

It looks like two different fairways but the above pics are the front and second half of the 17th fairway.  We installed new drainage in the front half two weeks ago and have not been able to get out and start on the second half yet.  What a difference.  Once we can finally tackle from the fairway bunker to the green, the fairway will be much improved than before.

Tree Removal

The oak tree that was struck by lightning on July 2nd is being removed today.  The tree showed immediate signs of die back and now that we are closed this week it was a perfect time to take it down.

Green and Fairway Aerification Underway

Better late than never, but we are finally punching holes in the greens.  A frost delay this morning held us back by 2 hours, so today we will finish 11 greens, leaving us 12 more to go tomorrow including our practice greens.  We are hoping to have all greens done tomorrow and then work on fairways and approaches the rest of the week.  Tough time of the year to pull cores as the sun is slow to come up and quick to go down but we will fight through it.  Clean up will take a little longer but hopefully by Friday we will have 80% of the fairways done.  Dryject is coming in on Wednesday to do our greens and then we will add nutrients on Thursday and topdress again if needed.  We probably will not mow greens, approaches or fairways until next week some time depending on weather.

Nursery Work

We are currently finishing stripping the barn hole fairway and rough to create a new turf nursery  that will be big enough for future needs.  The barn hole gets little usage with our improved practice facility so  we can better utilize this space to create a 20,000 sq ft nursery.  We will build the nursery with plugs from our greens this coming week when we aerify so we can create a nursery that matches our greens.  We have not pulled a core from our greens in 8 years and this will be the last time we do this probably for another 8.  We used the fairway sod for our drainage project the past few weeks and we have a few rolls left for the drainage still to be done.  We will also fill in the old bunkers as we do the nursery work.