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.