Summer of 2012 coming to a close.

We always say goodbye to summer with a good aerification of the greens. We pulled 5/8" cores last week. We also spot seeded some of the thin areas on the greens. With the 14-28-8 starter fertilizer we put out the greens should be back in good shape by this weekend. 

July thru August update...........

We have been very busy with the course this summer.  First was that our pump station was hit by lighting June 31st.

 You can see the black marks where the surge protectors exploded. This strike took out 6 fuses, 2 starters for our main pumps plus our PLC controller. We just recently got everything back up and going. Our pump station was down for 41 days this summer. We only had available one small jockey pump running by manual control. Our priority was just to keep the greens watered and occasionally we turned a tee box or two on for a couple of minutes. You can see in the pic below some of the stressed off color bermudagrass.

You can see the difference irrigation makes.

Heat stress on #7 and #3 Greens

Justin spiking #18 green

One of the biggest thing to happen is the installation of fans on #7 and #9 greens. These greens have special needs since there locations are less than prefect for growing bentgrass during the summer.

All in all this wasn't a terrible summer but we experienced some difficult days. We are looking forward to a wonderful fall golf season. We will be aerating greens August 20th and 21st.  

Venting greens.........

With the last 2 days being in the low 80's, 

I felt it was a good time to squeeze in a little maintenance on our greens. 

We vented with 3/8" tines
 followed by rolling and topdressing.

I also made a application of gypsum along with 0-0-30 POS.

With temperatures expected to be around 100* for the next three days.
 These efforts should help provide some relief over the next couple of days.

Temperatures rising in this update.

This week temperatures have been peaking around in the 90's. 

Some of the outlying roughs have started drying out. 

We will be hand watering some of these areas to supplement the extra water needed.

 I sprayed our first application of growth regulator to fairway and tees.

The new clubhouse is open now. 

We have done some work around the putting green to control the water shed from clubhouse and parking-lot.

Heavy rains unleash the river............

Yesterday we received a bit of a flash flood. It had rained since the night before putting down just over 3".

You can see the course handled this amount of water fairly good.

and as you can see, the creek was up just a couple of feet after the rain had stopped. It took less than an hour for the water from up steam to reach us.

It over took the banks of # 8 Green.

Then over the green.

A few of the the other areas on the course ...

 

The aftermath was not as bad as expected., we only had to wash off #18 fairway and #8 geenside.

May Aerification...........

  We finished our second aerification for the year today. We pulled 5/8" cores on a 2x3" spacing. We tried a few new techniques this time around. I'm always trying to improve the efficiency of this process and also keeping the playability of the greens.

 1st thing we changed is we topdressed greens before we pulled cores.

2nd we purchased the turf pride core collector. This enables us to drag some of the topdressing sand into the holes while also dragging cores to the edge for removal. By topdressing first, we keep the heavy topdresser from driving across the soften green and leaving tire ruts.

 
This time around we also increased the length of our tines from 5.5" to 6.5". this is probable the largest tines you could put on the Aercore .

 

We also tried using Fly mowers to move the sand into the holes. This worked good, but we experienced some bruising from some of the guys going over the same spot to much. We did 3 greens like this.

 We settled on just using one pass with a drag mat and rolling afterwards. I came back with a Humic Acid 70 granular product from Plant Food. After all this we still had a few holes open so I used the Dakota topdresser to apply a lite dusting. We then used dew whips to smooth out the sand with out having to drag the greens again.

Update....

Just a update on whats been happening on the course the last few weeks. We pulled the second cart for the year out of # 1 pond.

We have kept up with regular light topdessing since our last aerification.

We stripped the sod off of the back left of # 9 green. 

 There was a impermeable layer of clay that washed from the hillside. This caused the bent grass to struggle thru the summer. We removed all of the clay layer from this corner of the green.

We harvested bent sod off of our plug nursery that we established.

 Last of all we put out our new tee markers.