A little perk-up

Yesterday the golf course received a little perk-up from two different sources. The first came from a much needed fertilizer application.



With the threat of rain yesterday morning we didn't think we would be able to time our fertilizer application before the rain, but as fate would have it we were able to get out and fertilize wall to wall before any rain.
During our lunchtime the turf got its second perk-up with a much needed 3/10" of rain.



This was the first significant rainfall in about five months.
As we were out mowing and prepping the course this morning you could see the turf standing more upright and already had better color. I'm sure the fertilizer is just starting to kick in but it sure is amazing what a little rain can do on its own!



- Posted by Austin Daniells, Golf Course Superintendent

Watering Woes and Poking Holes

Water has and probably will be our biggest challenge from year to year. It has now been over 175 days since we've recorded any significant rainfall in our rain gauge. With nothing in the ten day forecast, watering is still at the forefront of our daily thoughts and decisions. Fortunately the days are getting shorter and the demand for irrigation has dropped off significantly in the last few weeks. Our biggest challenge with irrigation right now has nothing to do the quantity of water we have but the ability to get the water on the course.


The picture above shows a couple of our irrigation clocks that were run in to by a golf cart on Saturday afternoon. As of now, our assistant superintendent Tom was able to get one of them working but the other one is going to take a little bit of work and money to get back online. Our Toro irrigation rep is going to be coming by the course on Wednesday to help us get the right parts ordered and get everything back in working order. At this point we are running all of the irrigation on hole #17 by hand.
Well enough with the watering woes, now it's time to poke some holes. If you've been out playing in the last week you'll notice we went through and sliced all of the fairways with our Aerway slicer.


The Aerway slicer is a pretty non-disruptive aeration process that once mowed over isn't really noticeable. After a break this week we will be back out next week with a 5/8" solid tine on the fairways as well as a 5/8" coring of the tee boxes. Once the tees are finished up we will be coring a bunch of high traffic area throughout the course. Fairways and tees should be finished within the week.
- Posted by Austin Daniells, Golf Course Superintendent

Trees Planted @ #1 Tee

Today we finished up plating three more trees on #1 tee bank between the white tee and the split-rail fence. We felt like this would be a great place to add a little more color and a nice visual change. The trees are all 'fruitless plum' and although they do lose their leaves in the fall, next spring they should really have a nice contrast against the green turf. We also plan to continue to reduce the turf in this area and replace with wood chips as there is no real need to grow turf in this area.












- Posted by Austin Daniells, Golf Course Superintendent

Our fingers are crossed!

Today myself, Asst. Super Tom and a couple other team members transplanted a couple of trees from the postgraduate school to an area alongside the cart path that goes from #13 green towards #14 tee. These trees should help to break up some of the landscape as well as give some new sight lines off of #11 & #13 tees.
We will be transplanting three more trees to the right of the white tee on #1 in the next couple of days.
The title of this post is "Our fingers our crossed" because all of these trees have been in a 24" boxes for way too long. Hopefully they will enjoy their new environments!

- Posted by Austin Daniells, Golf Course Superintendent

Chipping Green Aerification

This past week Tom aerified our chipping green as a test for our summer aerification on the greens. We will finally be aerifying our green this coming July 16-18. After a little over 3 1/2 years we are finally seeing some evidence that aerification is necessary to keep our greens in the best condition possible. With the ever present threat of poa annua invading our bentgrass greens, we are waiting until July as less seed heads should be present. Here are a couple pictures of the process and the final product.






We went ahead and added some new seed after the holes were almost filled. We didn't really need to as we have a pretty good stand of bentgrass but we wanted to see what would happen as the seed started to grow and if it would have any affect on playability.
- Posted by Austin Daniells, Golf Course Superintendent

Did you notice??

If you haven't noticed the new look to our tee signs take another look!



Our resident handyman Craig has been busy the last couple weeks repainting the smaller numbers that designate each tee color on our tee signs.
When I ordered the the signs some three years ago all of the numbers were supposed to be a nice bright gold that I thought would look very nice against the green sign. But once the signs showed up at the course, the gold color was too dull to be seen from far away.
Last year Craig had painted the large hole number which really stood out well. So I approached him this spring about painting the small yardage numbers on the signs. After a little arm twisting he agreed and got started right away. I think it has really made a huge difference. Thanks again Craig for all you do for us!



- Posted by Austin Daniells, Golf Course Superintendent

Needle Tine and Top Dress

     This week we were able to get out and top dress and needle tine all of the greens. We split it up into two days with the front nine on Monday and the back nine on Tuesday. The main reason for this process was to open up the greens for a little air and gas exchange as well as break the surface tension that the bent grass creates to get more water below the surface. After the good flushing we received from the rains this last month the greens have been growing really well.
     We have been fighting a few hot spots on the greens in the last couple of weeks as you can see in the picture below.

Dry Area on #6 Green

     The process we went through the last couple mornings included mowing of the greens, top dressing the greens and aerification with an 8mm needle tine at 2" x 2" spacing. Next we used our sweep-n-fill sweeper to brush the sand into the turf canopy and followed that up with our greens roller. The final step was to run 4 to 5 minutes of water to get the greens through the day until we are able to get 30+ minutes of water on the greens at night.

View of the aerator on #3 green

View of the green before the needle tine

     This time around we were able to use our new roller attachment on our Toro 648 greens aerator. This was definitely a good purchase as we seemed to have a better after aerification look with less tufting of the aerification holes. Here's a look at the new roller.

New roller on the aerator

     We will continue to monitor the greens pretty close in the next few days to make sure they don't dry out more than we want since there will be a little more air reaching the root zone. We will be spraying greens on Wednesday with our bi-weekly foliar fertilizer application. We will also be spreading some gypsum and a 0-0-25 fertilizer with some minor nutrients to help get us through the next couple of months. All in all we should be healed up by the weekend and back to normal by next Monday.