On The Course September 4th

Fernando  with the first past of greens aerification on the Chipping Green.

 Last night we began our greens aerification process and were able to get the Chipping Green, #1, #2 and #3 done last night. This will give us a great start to the day. Our process is to aerify with a 0.5" I.D. side eject hollow tine, core harvest, fertilize, topdress, drag and broom the greens. We will continue to work the topdressing sand into the holes into the day Wednesday and expect the greens to be sandy through the weekend. The process is disruptive but very beneficial to the health of the turfgrass. We will end up applying almost 100 tons of sand today to the greens.

I have been hearing a few comments on the softness of our fairways and questions as to "over watering" the fairways. I plan the watering cycle each day with many factors to include but mostly based on weather. Over the past couple of days we have had high temperatures and low humidity which leads to a higher evapotraspiration rate. I look at the number of golfers we are going to have and the conditions of the course when setting up an irrigation cycle. When I look at the course I am not just looking at the middle of the fairways or greens but the edges and surrounds where most of our cart traffic occurs. My goal is to maintain turf on the edges of the fairways as much as possible and if you take a look at most of the edges of the fairways we are losing turf in high traffic areas. I try to balance the turf loss on the edges to a minimum but want to have some turf left on the edges to have the areas recover once we get into weather that will allow us to dry down the middle of the fairways without losing too much turf on the edges. If anyone has any specific questions or areas of concern please feel free to email or call me anytime. I would more than happy to take anyone on a course tour to explain some of the practices that we follow when maintaining the golf course.

Troy harvesting cores off the Chipping Green.

 We are mowing several greens this morning before we continue our aerification process. We are hopeful that the weather will be dry enough today so we can complete this process. Troy, Jason, Fernando, Rubiel and Jose were able to get a good jump on the process last night and we are hoping ot keep that rolling throughout the day today. We will be working on tee aerification today once we get far enough ahead on greens aerification. Later this week we will be working on fairway aerification which will involve a combination of deep tine, core and solid tine aerification.

Rubiel shoveling cores in the back of the ProGator to make room for more.