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.

Redesigning # 9 Greenside.......

This hole has had its ups and downs. It was shortened to a par 3 during the last renovation but eventually put back to a par 4.

The greens complex was situated on a hillside with no room for a player to miss the green.

This caused the green to suffer from silt being washed across the putting surface. The green also had sunlight and airflow issues that have been addressed before this renovation.

We started by grading out the hillside. We only had to lower one set of irrigation heads approximately 8". We did locate the greens drain Clean out under 6" of dirt.

The hillside after grading. All the dirt removed was used to build up the left side of the green to enlarge the greens complex.

 The retaining wall under construction.

 The wall is up and the final grading is going on. We edged out the greens to original size and design. we also removed the gravel walk up from the cart path.

Laying the sod. We did a Zeon Zoysia collar and the rest of the area is Tifgrand Bermudagrass. We even Had the owner (Tony) and G.M. (James) helping to lay all the sod.

 The sod is down, the wall is up, and the water is being laid to it.

We now have a hole that is a little more player friendly and gives you room to miss the green. All that's left is to fescue the hill behind the wall and around the perimeter of the sod.

Using the cores from aerification......

I have always used the waste from aerification to fill in low areas or to try and get some of the cores to take in bare areas around the course. I have always questioned, could these bentgrass plugs be used to sprig a bentgrass green. So I am conducting a little experiment on my driving range.

 

I started by striping the old nursery green of bermudagrass.

We cleaned the area of any bermuda stolons or material left in the soil.

We then loaded all the cores we had stock piled into a progator and dumped the cores into the green.

Spreading the cores to a depth of 1"-2".

The cores after packing.

Water and 50# Milorginite.

The green was very quick to green up 7 days

20 Day after putting out cores. 

Cores are growing rapidly. Currently mowing at .400. I will start lowing heights along with topdressing. We will see what happens with this green during the summer. I will post updates as it progresses.

Aerifing tees ...

 

5/8" Tee top aerification. We used the same tines as we used on the greens. With these two sets of Carbide Tip Tines we were able to aerifiy greens, tees and some approaches.

 

  We were able to remove a good amount of organic material.

 We used a steel drag to redistribute the sand back into the canopy.

After clean-up and a mowing, I came back and sprayed Ammonium Sulfate at .5# N/m