I haven't been actively blogging or tweeting this week and I apologize. Honestly, I haven't sat down long enough to type. This will become easier as I transition into the new world of the smart phone. We started with an action packed Monday and will wrap up today with three interviews for our vacant Assistant Superintendent positions. Let me give a weekly update today and then try and dive into our USGA site visit this weekend.
Monday: We installed 300 feet of irrigation between the patio and the clubhouse putting green. This will allow us to re-grass this area as well as install a chipping fairway for short game practice. We also took the opportunity to irrigate some of the landscaped beds as well.
We maximized our closed Monday by
topdressing and flushing greens.
Flushing Greens: The practice of watering the putting greens until the greens soil or mix reaches field capacity (all of the available pore space is filled with water) and breaks the perched water table between the greens mix and the subsurface gravel and drainage. This completely flushes all of the water through the drainage as well as flush the greens of any gas buildup, sodium, or copper and bring oxygen into the root zone.
Tuesday: We started to work on the leaf texture and quality of cut on our putting greens. After
core aerification, the greens have to recover and must receive heavy topdressing and fertility to properly grow in. During this time, the greens are sandy and growing very fast. Because of this, we get a very poor quality of cut and the leaves get a little too big for our liking. We started the process on Tuesday to begin grooming our greens. These groomers located between the front roller and the reel will stand up the grass to allow for a better quality of cut. We also dropped the height of cut .005" to .115" which will help us obtain a tighter cut. These changes and a lot of double cutting have shown results this week with a gain of 1.75 feet of greens speed on the
Stimpmeter.
Wednesday/Thursday: Concluded all bunker work except for the first three fairway bunkers on #18. These bunkers will remain ground under repair while we finish installing liner and sand. We hosted Stan Zontek, our USGA Green Section consultant and enjoyed two informative days of site visits, technical information, management ideas and camaraderie. Mr. Zontek is the director of the USGA Green Section's Mid-Atlantic region. He is the longest tenured USGA employee, joining the USGA staff in 1971. Stan will be very busy over the next two months in preparation for the US Open at Congressional Country Club. Once we receive his report, I will speak more about his visit.
Friday: Today, we are continuing to groom and double cut greens. We are spraying some plant health products to aid in recovery from aerification. I know that everyone has seen our team in full Tyvek suits spraying greens. This is a necessary safety measure for our applicators. All of the products that we spray are very safe for our golfers and are sprayed in accordance with their labeled rates.
Our team is cleaning up the golf course and weather permitting on Monday, we will begin mowing tees, approaches and fairways. The golf course is greening up and we couldn't be more excited to see Spring. While our team is very busy on the golf course, Eric and I will be conducting three interviews for our vacant Assistant Superintendent positions and one for a summer intern position. We are very excited about our candidate pool and this summer we will have five managers with Turfgrass Management Degrees as well as four interns that are pursuing degrees in the field of Turfgrass Management.
It has been a long week but a very productive one. The course is dry and greens are in good shape for the weekend. We are bracing for storms tomorrow but Sunday should be nice.
