I never thought that a blog post written in the middle of April and the next one written in the middle of May would be talking about snow in the Chicago area, but snow is again the talk of the superintendent world.  Fortunately, unlike the snow in the middle of April, the snow stayed north of the course this time.  Obviously, the "spring" weather that we have been experiencing has been the big story this week, but despite the weather, we have been able to get quite a bit accomplished recently, and the few spurts of warm weather that we have experienced have allowed the greens to recover nicely, and we will be putting the 8th and 9th green back into play for the season at tomorrow's Men's Mixer!  

If you haven't been out to the club to use the range yet, you will see that it has a new look to it.  To add some visual interest to the range field we converted the turf on the target mounds to bentgrass using sod from the small fairway on #5, and we added some bunkers to further add visual interest.  It really makes a big difference in the look of the range, and hopefully will enhance your practice sessions.

The new look range field.

Our other big task that we completed recently was verticutting the fairways.  We did this to the fairways last fall using some smaller machines, and it really helped stand up the turf, but didn't do much to reduce the thickness of the thatch layer.  This time we borrowed a dedicated verticutting machine that is mounted to a tractor.  It is much more aggressive and removed a great deal of thatch material.  Removing this thatch material will make the fairways less spongy and will hopefully provide a firmer playing surface in the future.  

The VC-60 throws lots of material!

Massive amounts of thatch were pulled out of the fairways.

Close-up of some of the material that was removed.