July Aerification Week...A.K.A. "the week of hell"

Aerification week is all about speed and efficiency. We have a long way to go, and endless list to accomplish, and a short amount of time to get it all done. For those football fans you'll appreciate the analogy of it being like you're down by 6, less than 2 minutes left, no time outs, and 80 yds to go. Forget about the huddle, you got to call the play at the line!

To say things didn't go as smoothly as hoped would be an understatement. We had the proverbial one step forward, two steps backwards week from hell. Within the first hour of aerifying the fairways, the machine broke...down for the day. Fortunately our head mechanic, Frank Novotny...an excellent wrench, was following the aerifier along and picking up the miscellaneous rock or stick that popped out.


That's when Keith and I got the call..."uhhh, hey Keith or Bill, you guys think you can come out to #10 for a minute?" Now you have to understand golf course mechanics, they are always fighting a losing battle to try and keep the machines working and cutting perfectly because the nature of the business it to beat the hell out of the equipment in the summer, so needless to say Frank was a little "upset" about the aerifier being broken. You can see in this picture where the steel tine hit the rock and snapped the metal link.


So when I rolled up to Frank to see what we going on he started hammering me about getting all the rocks out of the fairways and giving me the "we need to do this and we need to do that" business. Thinking I would placate him I said "ok, ok...I'll have a guy walk behind the aerifier and every time it hits a rock we'll flag the spot and have the guys dig up the rock."


All the while thinking there can't be that many rocks out here like the one that broke the aerifier. Right?! Well looking at the photos, I was way off, well once we got to #13 that is. Holes 1-12 had some rocks and sticks that we cleaned up in a couple of days. On hole 13 alone we had over 200 flags...meaning rocks to dig up.


Here are some of the hidden treasures we found on #10 in the rough areas.


Here is another pic of the fun we had with 13 fairway


As you can see, some were small



And some were not so small...we dumped all the large rocks on the lake banks behind 10 green and 13 tee so everyone could see what we dug up


This hole was from one rock, almost couldn't get it out!


In the end we will have dug up the majority of rocks on holes 1-14 and half of 18 (we just ran out of time to do them all). To repair the areas where we ripped up the grass getting the rocks out, we filled the holes with dirt and then sodded over them. Don't worry, we did a lot more clean up work around the newly sodded areas too.


To illustrate to you how punishing the aerification process is on the back 9 I took this pic. This is a new aerification tine compared to a "well used" one that we replaced after aerifying the rock. The new tine is solid hardened steel, 3/4" thick! The used tine is missing over an inch of material from smashing rocks.


*******I do want to point out that the rocks that are left in the golf course are not the contractor's fault. Where ever he dug or shaped and he hit a rock, he removed the rock. Some areas such as the left side of 10 rough or 13 fairway, the contractor didn't do a lot of earth work. In those areas where we didn't go down much beyond the initial scrape either do to existing irrigation lines or already installed drainage, we will have to remove the rock a little at a time over successive years.

On the front 9 fairways, tees, collars, and approaches we used a different type of aerification tine, a hollow tine that pulls a core out. We switched the process a little because these areas are sandy and I wanted to top dress these areas heavily anyway. Conversely, the back 9 is so rocky I didn't want to pull all of the pebbles to the surface and have another problem to deal with (the back 9 fairways will be top dressed with sand I will purchase). To break up all of the cores and get the sand to fall back into the grass canopy, a large steel drag mat is pulled behind a cart in a similar fashion as to what you have seen happen on the greens. This process separates the thatch from the sand so that the thatch can been blown off and removed and the sand can help maintain a firm surface.


In the end we did aerify everything. We broke a drive shaft, 4 steel arms, and a couple connection links, but we aerified everything. By the last day Frank and his assistant looked like a NASCAR pit crew when the aerifier came in for repair. We had air guns going, jacks flying, and wheels a spin'n baby...it was awesome!

Seriously though, when it comes to aerifying the greens in today's scientific mentality of golf maintenance it is all about "affected surface area" or how much of the green's surface did you remove. With todays high density ultra-dwarf putting greens, during the summer's aerification process you want to affect 30-50% of the green in total throughout the aerification season. Meaning you want to physically remove it! So in order to get to those stats it's all about hole size and spacing.

I aerify the greens with a 5/8" diameter hollow tine that pulls a 1/2" core and punch the holes approximately 1.5" apart. By closing the space between holes I can use a slightly smaller tine size as compared to 5 yrs ago. Using a smaller tine that is closer together allows me to creates a smaller hole which decrease the amount of time it takes to heal, but increases the amount of affected surface area (approx 15%). The old way was to use really large tines spaced about 2" apart which only gave you about 8% affected surface area. These large tines took forever to heal. The zig-zag pattern keeps the turf from pulling up when the machine pulls the cores out.


Everyone knows you aerify to alleviate compaction, but equally important is that you aerify to alleviate organic material as well. Notice all of the thatch and organic material that has built up over the last yr. Most of the sand has been knocked off, but the majority of the thing is thatch with a little greenery on the top. This is not necessarily a problem now, but in the short near future, if left unchecked, it would be. This is why I have all of the cores removed from the greens immediately following aerification. I do not want any additional organic material put back into the soil profile. Even the sand that we put back on the greens after aerification has no organics in it.


After aerification, its sand, brush, brush, brush, roll, roll, roll...


Many of you have seen my staff verti-cutting the greens and understand we do it to remove excess thatch and that it also helps with grain control. We do it frequently on the greens because the height of cut is so low. On the tees, collars, and approaches I had the guys use this machine to verti-cut the grass. It's called a Mat-a-way. Its a heavy duty veti-cutter that digs 1/2-1" into the soil and rips out the dead material. We used this machine on all tees and collars.


You can see here all of the thatch and snarly grass removed


I had plans to verti-cut the fairways this week, but we also ran into some bad luck there as well. First, our new machines were set up wrong so Frank had to repair that. Then, after using one of the fairway verti-cutters for only 5 seconds a bearing assembly blew apart. After that I had the vendor come pick the units up and take them back to their shop for repair and inspection. I mean if it weren't for bad luck this week we didn't have any.

On a more positive note though, we have started to receive some of our new capital items. One of the coolest pieces this year is a new irrigation monitoring system. The system uses wireless soil probes that are placed out in the ground on golf course and transmits the information back to my office where it is uploaded to a central computer and can be viewed on anything that can get onto the internet. The system is called Turf Guard and monitors soil temperature, salinity, and percent moisture.


Here is picture of what sort of information you can collect from the soil monitors. Notice the difference between the soil temperatures on 15 green and 16 green. You can see when I went from programing the sensors in the office to going outside, then you can see the temp changes as they were put in the greens. The top graph is sol moisture & the bottom graph is soil temp. Notice the inverse relationship! This is why we need a fan unit back in that cypress hammock so badly, we need to cool that green down so it loses less water and doesn't develope such disease issues. I've been watching the soil temperatures for a couple of days now and 15 green always runs 7-10 degrees hotter than 16 green.


Speaking of the devil, here's our new fan...yeah fan! Many of you are up north enjoying the searing heat waves and are used to seeing these things humming around the course to move the air. Well, research has shown that our new ultra-dwarf bermuda grass greens need air circulation just as much. The plan for the fan is to put it up in June and take it down some time around the end of September when the heat finally breaks. The unit will be on a timer that comes on around 10 a.m. and runs until 7 ish. I am putting the base in a valve box so when the fan comes down, you won't even know the mounting brackets is still there.


Ever see a one armed paper hanger? That's how life around a golf course is in the summer, gotta move fast before the glue dries! There's always more to do than hours of day light.

July 1

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.


Hopefully by now everyone has seen my staff out edging the perimeters of the greens. We do this to keep the grass in the fairways and roughs (the Celebration) from creeping into the putting surface. Try as we may, its a losing battle in the end and we have to plug out what makes it past our lines of defense. These little hexagonal plugs of Mini Verde are where the celebration "popped up" and should knit in and become inconspicuous in a couple of weeks.


One of the things that I've wanted to do for a while is to edge the cart paths. We have been burning them back with weed killer to keep them from growing over, but we haven't traditionally edged them since the grass was planted. Well, keeping them pushed back chemically worked great...that is until one of the lines got pushed a little too far back, and then that line got pushed back a little more, and that's how some of our 8 foot average wide cart paths got to be 12 feet in some places. To correct this, I let the cart paths grow unrestricted so we could correct the width problem without having to sod the edges. Once the paths were grown back in, Keith got the guys out to finally edge them and boy do they look a ton better. It took 8 guys a week to go all the way around as compared to next door that would probably use 2-3 guys in a day. The reason for the huge difference is that we do not have a permanent edge like a piece of concrete that can be quickly edged and then blown off. Our paths have to be edged, then cleaned with a shovel, and then the material loaded into a cart and hauled off. It takes lots of labor! I know this isn't glamorous material, but it's the little victories that win the war.


Notice the right side compared to the left


I thought this was pretty cool, its an alligator laying in a drainage pipe with his nose into the current waiting on lunch to wash down. He is about 5 feet long...and FAT!


I'll be the first to admit that I push the staff like we are going down hill in a Ferrari, top gear, with the accelerator to the floor. But I do appreciate my men's hard work and I am also the first to say thank you to them when I hand out paychecks. I also let them know the Club appreciates their hard work by doing periodic cookouts for them. By the way, my guys go nuts for Johnsonville brats! We try to do this once a month and include some sort of safety training along with it.


Stay tuned for more exciting episodes...

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.



On this video, when the aerifer head jumps...that's a rock.


After aerification of all of the fairways, I lowered the height of cut on the large pull frame cutting units and circle cut the fairways...literally mowed them in circles. The circular motion or twisting of the cutting units allows them to be much more aggressive in their cut as compared to just straight line mowing as you normally see. The result is a "scalped" look. The scalped areas are where the grass had become very "grainy" or laid over and the circle cutting just cut it off. By doing a lot of circle cutting in the summer, a more erect growth habit is promoted. The erect growth allows the ball to sit up on top of the grass blades better rather than lay in the grass.

Here's the process of circle cutting.


After circle cutting. Its ugly, but only last about 4-5 days.


Here is a pic of #5 fairway after the aerification and circle cutting.



A new challenge that came along with the new course is trimming all of the landscape grasses. Luckily they are off to the side and we can work on them slowly throughout the summer because this is a huge job. The grasses require very little maintenance, but the maintenance they require is very labor intensive.


Another one of the summer's big projects was to eliminate some cart path on hole #12 behind the green and turn it into a grassed area. This will help with balls that roll over the green and give you additional grass area to allow the ball to try and stop. Although it is a relatively simple project in concept, it was difficult to do. The main reason for the difficult was that we had to remove the cart path material that was as hard as concrete. To get the upper hand, I rented a small bucket loader to scrape out the cart path materials.


Then the staff brought in some fill dirt to raise the elevation a bit to create a mini backstop effect.


To save sod costs, we tied in the ground preparation for the new landscape enhancements on #8 with the cart path removal project. Since we were going to spray out and kill the grass on #8 where the landscape enhancements were going in we just cut sod from there to use for our project on #12. We were able to cut enough sod from #8 we didn't have to buy any new sod.




As you can see, we are staying very busy. Lots to do and only a few more months until everyone returns. Yikes! Gotta go, time to start another project.