Weather and Greens Aerification

It's been a rainy week here as evidenced by our postponed greens aerification.  Leading up to today, we have had rain on six of the last seven days, and if you go back a little farther, seven out of the last twelve.  Add it all up and we've had 2.3 inches of rain in the last week and 2.7 inches in the last twelve days.  All this rain and dampness leads to a very soft and wet golf course, especially this time of year.  As the days get shorter, the sun gets less intense, and temperatures are lower the course takes much longer to dry than it does in the summer.  Two and a half inches of rain over the course of two weeks in July would probably be a welcome reprieve from having to irrigate the golf course, but now it just leads to a wet course.  The course seems to be starting to soak up the water now, but there are still some very wet and soft areas.  The course should be able to dry out over the next week as the forecast is calling for sun and higher temperatures for the next week or so.

Monday's forecast for sun and 70 degrees is holding strong, and that has us excited to get the greens aerified.  That is the ideal weather for aerifying anything on the course.  The plugs should come out of the ground nicely and be easy to pick up, and the sand topdressing that we put down to fill the holes will dry quickly and be easy to spread around.  Also, the warmer temperatures that are called for next week will get the greens growing again, and the holes should fill in quickly.  The plan for aerifying the greens remains the same as it was on our first attempt.  We will try to get all of the work completed on Monday, October 3, but some of the topdressing work may have to carry over into Tuesday.  Work that continues into Tuesday may cause the back nine to be closed for part of the day.  As always, I will post updates of the process on the blog and keep the pro shop informed of our progress.   

Greens Aerification Postponed

Due to the rainy weather we are having today, aerification of the greens has been postponed.  We will try again next Monday, as the forecast for the next few days isn't looking very conducive to aerifiying either.  Hopefully, the weather cooperates with us next week. 

Greens Aerification Reminder

We will be aerifying the greens next Monday, September 26th.  Please take this into consideration when making your golf plans for the week.  The plan is to finish completely on Monday, but as always, that is subject to change depending on how the process goes.  We are going to be pulling small cores, since we weren't able to get that done this spring, and then heavily topdressing with sand to fill the holes.  On Monday, we will definitely be able to complete the aerification, but may not be able to finish all the topdressing work.  If we are not finished we may need to keep the back nine closed for part of the day so that we can finish up.  I will post up our progress Monday afternoon.

Seeding, Collars, and Broken Things

With the fairway aerification behind us, it was time to move onto some other projects until we aerify the greens on Monday September 26th, so you may notice some of the projects going on this week.  The first is the pile of dirt in the driving range that has been an eyesore for the past year or so has been graded smooth and seeded.  Now we just have to keep the seed moist, and it should start to turn green in a few weeks.

Another project we started this week and will be ongoing throughout the fall and next spring is our collar uniformity project.  Over the years, the collars around the greens have become extremely varied in size, mostly larger, because of greens mower operators trying not to scalp the collars, so we will be working to achieve a uniform collar width of 48 inches, except in the areas that are intentionally expanded.  Without a uniform width for the collars, the collars will continue to expand because there is no standard width to use for marking collars for the mowers to follow.  Expanding collars and shrinking greens will result in lost hole placements and even more uneven collar sizes.  It's not an easy process to reduce the height of cut from a half an inch down to less than an eighth of an inch so we are going to take our time to minimize scalping of the turf and to try and have as little turf loss as possible.  We have marked all the collars and have made our first height of cut reduction down to a quarter of an inch, and for the most part it went pretty well with only a few areas getting slightly scalped.  In addition to reducing the height of cut, we will also be doing some extra aerification, topdressing, and verticutting to help the turf adjust to the changing height.  Also there will be some areas where there is no benefit to shrinking the collar to add green area so we will be shrinking the collar from the outside by removing bentgrass from the outside and sodding it to bluegrass rough. Hopefully, we will be able to achieve greens height this fall, but it may not be until next spring.  Look forward to a few new hole locations and a cleaner look to the golf course. 

Remember me saying something about our tractor having a major breakdown last week?  Well this is what it looks like right now, and yes it's in two pieces, actually there is third piece on the work bench.  Our equipment technician, Tom is tackling this major project.  A bearing inside the transmission of the tractor failed and tore up quite a few other parts inside.  This is the only way to get at the parts.  As always, I'm very glad we have him here.  I could never remember how to put that all back together.

The Process

Here we go as promised, the fairway aerification process in pictures!

Step 1 - Pull the cores, and leave them on the ground to dry.

Step 2 - After a few hours of drying in the sun, the cores are ground up with a flail mower.

Step 3 - Drag the ground up loose soil back into the turf and into the aerification holes.

Step 4 - Blow off the excess soil and left over tufts of grass and thatch.

Step 5 - Mow the fairway with baskets to pick up excess soil and cut off grass that was
tufted up by the drag mats.

The Final Product - From a distance you can barely tell anything happened!

As you can see, it's a lot of work, but the result and the benefits are worth the work.

Aerification - Day 1

Yesterday's aerfication went really well.  We were able to complete all the front nine fairways, number 10, and number 12.  Most years, we are wrapping up work on number six (our last front nine fairway) as it's beginning to get dark.  This year, we were almost finished with it by 3:30!  For almost the entire day, our equipment ran well, which is a rarity.  I say almost because our tractor that runs the big blower had a major breakdown towards the end of the day.  Fortunately, our friends at Ravisloe are going to be bailing us out today with a spare tractor.  Tee and collar aerification also went well, as the front nine is complete and ready for play. 

I had planned on getting pictures of the whole process up on the blog yesterday, but it was a very hectic day and didn't get a chance to take the pictures.  Since we don't have quite as much work to complete today, I will try to get pictures up later this afternoon.

Remember that the back nine is closed today until the aerification is complete.  If all goes well again today, we should be able to open the back sometime in the afternoon.  Check with the pro shop for the latest updates.

Feels like Fall

We've had some cool mornings lately, but this one really feels like fall, there is a steady breeze out of the north, and the guys on the crew donned gloves and sweatshirts.  Today was also the first day in months that I grabbed pants out of the closet instead of shorts, and I was very glad I did.

As usual, with fall comes aerification, tomorrow we will begin process of aerfiying the tees, fairways, and collars.  The weather that we have could not be any better for it.  The rain that we got over the weekend has the soil nice and moist, but not saturated, and the sun and 70 degree temperatures will get the plugs to dry without burning up the turf.  Perfect.  Since the weather appears that it's going to cooperate, all that we have to have now is cooperation from our aging equipment.  If all goes well tomorrow, we will work from before dawn until dark to get the front nine and hopefully a little more completed.  Wednesday, the back nine will be closed to golf until we are finished with our work, which hopefully will be done sometime late afternoon, and Thursday golf will be back to normal.  Of course, this is all a big if.  Fingers crossed that everything goes well.  We did some test runs on the nursery to make sure everything was working properly and it is for now, but the equipment really takes some abuse during this process and anything can happen when a machine is punching holes in the ground for 12 hours straight.

Remember that the greens will not be aerified this week.  We will be aerifying them on September 26th so get out and enjoy the best golfing weather of the year.