Off and running!

Good Friday morning! Things are full speed ahead at this point. And we are finally seeing some green up and growth out on the course. 

The greens are healing well from aeration. The cool spring has kept growth to a minimum, which in turn slowed the healing process. This week though we started to make some headway. We switched to the "good" greens mower this morning, which puts a period on the aeration process. 

We've also had some great seed germination in the tees as well as the aerated and seeded fairways. Hopefully we can get some of these areas established and filled in before they become flooded again ( likely tonight unfortunately ). The constant rainfall isn't helping considering 90% of these areas ended up like this because of last years rain. Picture below shows the seed coming up in the aeration holes. This is the low area on #10 that was damaged last summer and fall. 

At this point all of the fresh course accessories are out. We have all new flag sticks, flags, cups, and bunker rakes. The ball washers as well as the fairway and par three tee yardage plates were given a facelift. 

Have a good weekend!

What A Week!

Wow. What a week. Greens aerification is complete and things are really getting into gear. And it just keeps raining!!

Greens aerification went about as good as I could have hoped, given the hurdles we faced. The plan was to do a core aerification with 1/2 inch tines. However as last week wore on and the forecast for Friday to Tuesday got more wet, I had 5/8 inch solid tines two day shipped to us. I knew we were already wet heading into the weekend. With rain forecasted on Friday night, Sunday night, and showers, clouds, drizzle for Monday and Tuesday, forging ahead with the coring tines didn't make much sense. The greens would have been too soft for the core harvester and we don't have the personnel to shovel. Plus the plugs wouldn't have dried out very well, if at all.  

Here is what we came out to on Monday morning ... 

Not ideal to say the least. Despite the weather we went to work. We had to make an adjustment after the first green when it was clear that they were too soft to be punched and top dressed after. So we started top dressing before punching them, which worked out fine. As for the top dressing, I knew given the wet greens and wet sand, that putting a bunch of top dressing down was a recipe for a headache. I knew going in that our best chance of doing a decent job getting the top dressing down while also having decent playing conditions was to do the top dressing a little at a time. We ended up top dressing three to four times between Monday and Wednesday. Dragging and blowing it in each day. This actually went better than I would have expected. I'd estimate we got 90% of the holes filled when all was said and done. And by Wednesday afternoon, the greens were very playable and rolling well. We also top dressed approaches as we went.

#4 with the first coat of top dressing ... 

So the process ended up looking something like this:

1. Top dress
2. Aerify
3. Drag
4. Blow
5. Seed
6. Roll
7. Cups

Wednesday afternoon we did our final drag and blow. Thursday morning we sprayed them with fertilizer to help the healing process. Friday morning we mowed them for the first time, mainly picking up sand. 

It is Saturday morning now and in a shocking turn of events, it rained last night and this morning ... But this rain is a good thing for the greens. I did go out and take a look and took some pictures that I'll put below. On top of all of this, we did also get our first fairway mow in. Didn't cut much but cleaned them up some and put some stripes out there for you. Hopefully the rain is done and we can have a good weekend!

#15 green this morning ... 

I'm pretty happy all things considered. Thanks to the crew for putting up with a difficult few days and getting the job done. 

Welcome to April!

Wow. Time sure does hum right along. And we are busy!

Fairway and approach aerification started this week. We are core aerifying all of the fairways and approaches. We are also seeding all of the approaches and any thinned or damaged fairway areas. We are a little over halfway finished. Once we are done coring, we are going back over the approaches with the same solid tines we used on tees. After which we seed them again. 

Pic of #10 fairways punched. 

The solid tine aerification and seeding of the tees was completed late last week. We will now wait about a month and do a core aerification, as well as put down more seed. 

Pic of tee post punch and seed. 

Greens aerification is scheduled for Monday and Tuesday. The weather is not looking great with an 80% to 90% chance of rain Monday morning and a 50% chance on Tuesday morning. And with rain also likely tomorrow, it seems we may be battling uphill. Hopefully the forecast improves ...