Open For Business

The golf course has been closed for the past four days for scheduled maintenance. The original plan for this week was to aerify and verticut fairways and approaches as well as greens. However, following the significant amount of rainfall experienced the week prior, we were forced to change our plans. The mowing of the entire golf course was behind due to all the rain and much time was spent catching up with the mowing. With most areas being saturated, it wasn't possible to perform the aerification and verticutting on fairways. Because of this, we shifted our manpower efforts to other projects. We were able to aerify greens with small tines, work on weed control, remove grain from the old tees, spread wall-to-wall fertilizer, weedeat the entire golf course, edge all the bunkers and work to remove invasive vines from many of the hedge lines. We also had time to install new drains around #10 tee.

Pedro aerifying #2 green

A few days later the greens are ready for play!

New drain line on #10 ready for sod

Today marks the opening of our new tees. Please keep in mind that while the tees are playable, they are nowhere near the finished product. Similar to the development witnessed over the past several weeks, the tees will continue to mature more and more each week. Not only will the grass density continue to increase, we have treated the volunteer weeds which will soon wither and die.

We worked hard over the past few weeks around the weather to get the height of cut down to a playable level. This height reduction results in the tees being less green than how they appeared previously. As the grass adjusts to the new height of cut, it will return to a normal green color.

At this point, most of the new tees are mature enough to facilitate play. However, we will be conservative on where we place markers in order to avoid thinner areas. Because of this, you may find tee markers at yardages different from where they normally would be. I do ask that everyone refrains from driving golf carts on any of the new grass. Nothing wears out grass faster than cart traffic.

We are still waiting for another load of sod to help us complete some of the areas plagued by washouts with the substantial summer rains. Due to wet sod farms and high demand for grass, sod has been very difficult to obtain this summer. I am told that hopefully this week another load will be available.

#4 Tee ready for play

#10 Tee

While from a distance the tees have a brown tint to them, a closeup of the tee displays a significant amount of green leaf blades

While we had hoped to manage thatch across the entire golf course, the weather had other plans. We did manage to address our old tees by lowering the height and cutting into the grain. The end goal is to provide a tighter, better playing tee surface. While these tees currently appear to be scalped, they will quickly recover.

#9 Tee following thatch management

These new green shoots were visible the day after the thatch program was performed

Finally, we were able to spread our quarterly application of fertilizer and weed control to the entire golf course. This application was scheduled for late July but because we have had so much rain, we were just now able to get it applied. A contractor uses a spreader truck to apply the fertilizer. This results in tire tracks in some areas. These tracks will roll out and disappear over the next week.

Tire tracks on 3 fairway

With all the rain, Fernando got creative on how to stay dry!