It's November Already?

Wow, I'm looking back at my last post and realizing that it's been a month since I've posted up any new content.  October seems to have just flown by, and I apologize for not keeping the blog up to date recently. 

In the last month, the course has taken on it's fall look.  About half the trees have lost their leaves now, but we still have a long way to go with leaf cleanup as the silver maple trees make up about 30 percent of our tree population, and they have barely begun to shed their leaves.  As you can imagine, leaf cleanup is our main task in the fall, and it continues until Thanksgiving, some years it carries into the first week of December.  Other changes that occur to the course during the fall is the 'Washington' creeping bentgrass that is present on on most of our greens turns purple, it is most noticeable on the 18th green.  This is a physiological reaction to the colder temperatures, and has no impact on the health of the plant. 

A few weeks from now, we will be giving the golf course it's final preparations for winter.  On November 18th, we will be blowing irrigation system out, and during that same week we will be spraying preventative fungicides for snow mold disease and applying dormant fertilizer to the greens and tees.  The final step in winterizing the turf will be a heavy application of topdressing sand on the greens around Thanksgiving.  This heavy topdressing helps to protect the plant from the cold dry winds we can get here, and it has also helps the turf green up quicker in the spring. 

Although we are nearing the end of the golf season, we are still working on some projects.  The main project that we have been working on this fall is reducing the collar widths to a uniform size of 48 inches.  Those of you have been out to play this fall have probably noticed the areas of collar that are being mowed down to greens height.  We are a little over half way in the slow process of reducing the height of cut now, and there has been very little area that has been damaged.  Over the past few weeks we have been working on "Phase 2" of this project which is making some areas of collar into rough, and reducing the collar size from the outside. 

This past weekend, I got a chance to get away from the area and visit my alma mater, Penn State for a football game.  When I planned this trip in June, I was definitely not expecting the weather conditions to be what they were.  Hopefully we don't see anything like this for another month or so.