Wood Refinishing

During frost delays in the winter months, the golf course maintenance staff has been refinishing the woodwork on the golf course.  This includes benches and trash cans located on tee boxes as well as rope line stakes throughout the course.  By refinishing these items during the winter, we can ensure they continue to look their best throughout the year.

The following photo shows our staff during this process

Fairway Aerification/Topdressing

Fairway Aerification/Topdressing

This winter we will be continuing our fairway aerification and topdressing program. This process includes, deep tining the fairways, coring the fairways, dragging the plugs, collecting the plugs with our large vacuum, topdressing, and finally dragging the sand into the cored holes. We start this important process during every off-season to improve air flow, and relieve soil compaction, which then leads to better rooting for the fairways during the year. The topdressing helps fill in the holes left behind, which decreases the recovery time. In addition, the sand helps provide a firmer, well draining surface to play on. We have seen incredible results over the past twelve years amending our heavy clay soils. The infiltration rates, percolation rates, and playability at all times of year has improved immensely.

 The following photos show the process in action:

Bermudagrass Progress

We continue to see great relults in all of the bermudagrass areas on the golf course. The herbicide sprays are weakening the bermudagrass and stunting rooting and stolon growth. We will continue to spray these areas through the first hard frost. Our hope is to send the bermudagrass into winter as weak as possible and with very few stored carbohydrates.

As you can see in this picture, the tall fescue that we have seeded into the bermudagrass right of ten green is germinating nicely. Holes ten, eleven and thirteen have the greatest concentration of bermudagrass in the rough, and the thirteenth hole was the last area we seeded. You will see drastic differences in these areas over the next couple of weeks.

Walk Path and Int. Cut Renovation

We wanted to give everyone some insight into how we went about renovating the walk paths and Intermediate Cuts around the golf course. As we talked about in an earlier post, we have sprayed all of these areas with Tenacity to eliminate bentgrass. We also sprayed any common bermudagrass in these areas with a new product that we have been testing through the summer months.

The process then started with our disc seeder making two passes through the walkpaths and intermediates dropping seed along the way.

We can't get as tight to the fairway line as we like with this piece of equipment, so we follow up with aerifiers. these aerifiers are poking holes on very tight centers approximately half an inch deep.

Drop seeders are then used on all walk paths and intermediates to ensure perfect coverage.

Starter fertilizer is then applied and all areas are watered-in. We will continue to keep these areas moist and in the next seven days we will see great germination. We will touch up any areas that need additional seed at the end of next week, and then we will begin to mow the new seedlings.