We have begun our typical summer rain pattern. Glorious mornings, heats up fast, cloudy afternoons, and rains in the late afternoon....YEAHHHHHHHHH! As you may recall from the last posting, even though it was summer water was in short supply. Now, Mother Nature is lending a helping hand.
We are still rolling along with the summer plans. Next week we are closing again for aerification. I am anticipating this time to go even more smoothly than the last time since we now know what to expect with the new course. The only thing different this time is that we will verti-cut the fairways and then topdress them. I eliminated this process in June since we were still unsure about available irrigation water. Now that its raining, there should be plenty of available water from the City so we can move forward with all of our plans.
A few things have happened recently that I thought I would share / educate everyone on. One being a recent application of a product called Curfew. Curfew is a soil injected pesticide that kills microscopic root parasites called nematodes. These parasites severely inhibit the grass roots from being able to supply the leaves with enough water and nutrients, thus causing drastic thinning of the canopy as seen below in a picture of #6 tees.
The material used to control nematode populations is sliced into the ground 6 inches deep and injected as a liquid. The liquid then volatilizes and diffuses up through the soil profile to reach the targeted pests. Here is a pic of #1 after treatment. The brown lines are not burns from the applied product, they are from where the injector cut the grass that was laying over and the leaf tissue died. Similar to if you cut a branch from a tree, the leaves will die because they can't receive any water or nutrients from the roots.
This is a pic of #14 fairway where the nematode population devastated the turf. These areas will be put on a heavy fertilizer diet to promote rapid recovery now that the root system can supply the leaves with what they need. Notice the lines running through the bare area. Again, that's from the process of injection.
A couple of days ago I was asked about our green's verti-cutting process. The person had seen it happening while playing, but didn't understand what all the machines were doing. Take a look at this short video I shot to help explain what we do to manage the thatch on the greens. Notice all the people and machines, this process takes 10 people to do it.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Monday, June 14, 2010
June 14th..well I started this on June 14th. Today is actually June 28th
As luck would have it, either good or bad, we are having the same dry weather this summer as we did last yr. That's great for the other Clubs in town that are renovating their golf courses, stinks for us because we need the rain to give a reprieve from the demand on the re-use irrigation water system. With 2/3 of the population gone in the summer there is nobody here taking showers and flushing the toilets to supply the effluent treatment plant with "supply" that ultimately gets turned into irrigation water for golf courses. That's a long story for telling you that we have no irrigation water! As many of you know, we receive our water from the City of Naples and due to the lack of supply, we have been getting shut off 2 out of every 3 days. That makes maintaining a golf course in the summer very very hard, especially when it comes time for our summer maintenance. Despite our water challenges we are doing fairly well so don't get too alarmed. It's just that when things get dry, it's not because we don't see it; it's because we can't water it.
Despite all of our current challenges, things at the Club at moving along well. We are getting our list of "to do's" done as fast as we can. We have been in a holding pattern to start the installation of the new landscape enhancements as well because of the water situation. There's no sense in trying to plant new material and have to worry about it dying because I can't water it. But, it will rain...I guarantee it!
As part of our summer improvements regarding water, we have started installing additional sprinklers where needed to increase our irrigation application efficiency.
Areas on slopes facing away from sprinkler heads are where application weaknesses show the worst, so that's where we've been concentrating.
Here, on the back of 1 blue tee and the slope is a good example. All of the irrigation water from the larger heads shoot over the area that is dry.
To alleviate the localized dry spot we added a small head at the bottom of the slope, shooting up the slope, to cover the area.
Here on #15, the cart path side of the bunker where the slope falls away from the large sprinkler head, I had irrigation added as well to help with the same problem.
As you know, the Club embarked on a new program this year of closing for 5 days in a row to enable golf maintenance to perform all of the necessary tasks to keep the course in top shape. Our first week went very smoothly. We were able to complete the aerification of all greens, tees, approaches, collars, fairways, and roughs in about 3.5 days (thank you Board members for buying the Club those wonderful new aerifers). Due to the lack of available irrigation water, I reduced our maintenance scope a little bit as I didn't want to beat the course up too badly then struggle to nurse it back to health, but we did get 75% of what we had hope to do done.
Here's our new green's aerifier doing it's job perfectly. Thank you CCN for purchasing this new machine.
The fairways and roughs were also aerified during the closure. The front 9 went super smooth, the back 9 was a little bit...well let's just say rocky. I knew this was going to be the case. During the renovation the back 9 is where we dug up all of the rock and the front 9 was were we dug up all the sand. Makes sense, right?! Here is just a little example picture and video of what we ran into on the back 9 fairways.
Despite all of our current challenges, things at the Club at moving along well. We are getting our list of "to do's" done as fast as we can. We have been in a holding pattern to start the installation of the new landscape enhancements as well because of the water situation. There's no sense in trying to plant new material and have to worry about it dying because I can't water it. But, it will rain...I guarantee it!
As part of our summer improvements regarding water, we have started installing additional sprinklers where needed to increase our irrigation application efficiency.
Areas on slopes facing away from sprinkler heads are where application weaknesses show the worst, so that's where we've been concentrating.
Here, on the back of 1 blue tee and the slope is a good example. All of the irrigation water from the larger heads shoot over the area that is dry.
To alleviate the localized dry spot we added a small head at the bottom of the slope, shooting up the slope, to cover the area.
Here on #15, the cart path side of the bunker where the slope falls away from the large sprinkler head, I had irrigation added as well to help with the same problem.
As you know, the Club embarked on a new program this year of closing for 5 days in a row to enable golf maintenance to perform all of the necessary tasks to keep the course in top shape. Our first week went very smoothly. We were able to complete the aerification of all greens, tees, approaches, collars, fairways, and roughs in about 3.5 days (thank you Board members for buying the Club those wonderful new aerifers). Due to the lack of available irrigation water, I reduced our maintenance scope a little bit as I didn't want to beat the course up too badly then struggle to nurse it back to health, but we did get 75% of what we had hope to do done.
Here's our new green's aerifier doing it's job perfectly. Thank you CCN for purchasing this new machine.
The fairways and roughs were also aerified during the closure. The front 9 went super smooth, the back 9 was a little bit...well let's just say rocky. I knew this was going to be the case. During the renovation the back 9 is where we dug up all of the rock and the front 9 was were we dug up all the sand. Makes sense, right?! Here is just a little example picture and video of what we ran into on the back 9 fairways.
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