August 31, the dawg days of summer are here!!!

We are officially in the Dawg days of Summer!!! Its almost oppressive outside and that gives me all the more respect for my staff for not only enduring, but pressing harder because I asked them to. Although we have received enough rain to float Noah's ark in the last 3 weeks, the staff has made great progress preparing for the upcoming season.

One huge project we have been working on is cleaning up the potato vine that consumes everything in its path. Here you can see how bad the hedge on 16 had gotten in one year. The potato vine had grown over 75% of the hedge in certain spots and completely consumed some of the palm trees.


Here is after my staff worked all day to remove the vine. Notice that you can now see the palm tree fronds.


My guys have completed removing as much vines they could from all of the hedges along the eastern property line and 16. In total they removed about 100 cubic yards of potato vine. For those of you who are here you'll notice massive amounts of the vine yellowing out as it dies along the cart path from 14 green to 16 tees. We are attacking it on a large scale now as it is starting to make new seed pods...the potatoes.

Along the cart path on 15 we have been doing a lot of work to remove all of the encroaching vine and exotic trees as well. Here's a quick video on what happens to the approaching enemy forest.


As you can see, I try to shred as much of the material as possible to use it as mulch. Also, it cuts down on the expense of having to haul off all the debris. Most of you know that we are tackling the monumental task of trimming all the palms trees in house this year and have seen the blog pictures of the massive amount of "waste" generated from the trees. Well, I've found a way to use that waste and turn it into finely shredded mulch for us to use around the course in our upcoming course wide mulch marathon. Check out this next sequence....

We trim the trees


We haul trimmings and any other horticultural waste to my shop


Then we do this....in one side as waste, out the other as usable mulch!


Take a look at this short video and see it in action!


Now that's recycling at its finest!!!

We've also been finishing up lots of other projects that got side tracked due to bad weather. I'm happy to say that we are finally finished with all of the new landscape enhancements. Here is a pic of some new palms planted on the left of #3 fairway to help knock down some of the those left turning shots just past the Plageman's house


I added a few palms here because of a severely high nematode count in the soil that made growing healthy grass impossible. Because this spot is within the required 30 foot buffer zone from any dwelling when using Curfew to treat for nematodes, we were not able to treat the area to control the problem. So instead of looking at thin, weed infested grass I planted the palms so we can purposely kill the grass and put down some mulch.


While the tree trimmer was on #8 green, I had him turn this dead cypress into a perfect snag. A snag is a dead tree left standing. Just because a tree is dead doesn't mean that it doesn't serve nature still. There are several reasons to leave snags up and probably the most popular is that birds of prey like eagles, owls, osprey, and hawks like to nest in snags. These birds like to use snags because they have large wind spans and they don't want to take a chance on damaging their only means of transportation in a tree that has lots of small, close together branches. By trimming off all of the "twiggy" material in this snag, and its close proximity to a lake, I created a perfect Osprey nesting site. I've seen several Osprey sitting on this tree so lets keep our fingers crossed.


I added these areca palms in front of the old maintenance building area between the driving range and #5 to break up the view of the building from the range tee. In a couple of years these new guys should be catching up to the really big arecas on the sides of the range and completely hide the building.


A little tweak to the course that is really nothing other than a height of cut change is this new run off area behind #8 green. I wanted to put this in prior to opening last year but didn't have time before we opened to get the grass cut down and used to being mowed short. This will be a nice compliment to the natural shape of the green and surrounds.


As you already know, a couple weeks ago we verti-cut the fairways pretty aggressively, followed by a light top dressing. Any areas that were a little bit thin or a crease was made from a machine were hand top dressed so we can keep the smooth contours. In a couple of weeks these lines of sand should disappear.


To help the fairway areas heal in and get full coverage, it would seem appropriate to give the grass a little food to promote new growth. Now when I buy fertilizer, I tend to buy a little bit more than what you would go buy at Home Depot. Here Eric is filling up a 4 ton spreader from a trailer called a kilabrew. Each one of the 4 hoppers can hold almost 5 tons of material. That would probably do your yard a few times, and many most of your neighbors too.


My philosophy on fertilizing (or feeding the grass) is similar to how I eat...or should eat I guess. I don't sit down once a month an gorge myself, at least I try not to. Most of the time I eat smaller amounts more often. That's exactly how I fertilize the course, small amounts more often or "spoon feeding." This way I feel the grass has a better chance of absorbing the food before it either floats down the drain in the summer or gets washed past the root system from irrigation. Starting now through April we will be out fertilizing the course about every 2-3 weeks with light rates of fertilizer to continually spoon feed in nutrients to promote a health turf.

You may have read in my last posting that I had the area's USGA Agronomist in to do a site visit. The purpose of the visit is to ensure the maintenance practices are in line with the overall long term success of the course for both health and playability. Part of what the Club receives in having the USGA out is a written report of what was observed during the visit. These reports are excellent in explaining in a non-biased way what the practices were in place when they visited, what observations were made, what observations have been made at other facilities that might be helpful, and what long term practices are recommended. I truely hope that you will take the time to read it and better understand your golf course and the science behind the maintenance practices. Click here USGA REPORT




News flash....its raining again! More to come, stay tuned.

August Aerification Week

Another aerification week has come and gone...all things considered, it went fairly well. We started off the week with a lot of afternoon rain, which during a week when you are beating up the course is a kiss of death. Monday and Tuesday we spent all morning making a huge mess hoping it would stay hot and dry so we could have an easy clean up only to see the storm clouds building up to the south of us. Fortunately we had already planned on working the course in small sections at a time in case it rained so the race to clean everything up before it turns into a huge pile of mud wasn't so bad. Despite our Monday and Tuesday woes, the rest of the week was really productive as the weather held out for us.

As usual during our aerification weeks, late on Sunday afternoon the greens were aerified. One thing I did differently this time was to use a smaller tine which produced a small hole. The reason I did this was because I wanted to remove less of the mat layer or the "cushion" under the grass so the greens will become more receptive. I was asked a great question the other day, "why are you aerifying the greens so much if we want to build up a mat layer to soften the greens?" The answer is that its all about managing the build up.

Try to imagine the soil profile as a large tank, and the grass building up the mat layer which make the greens more receptive is like a hose filling the tank up. As the grass grows, it naturally fills up the tank. Now think of the aerification process like a drain at the bottom of the tank. To make sure the tank doesn't over flow we have to open the valve (aerify) to let some of the water out of the tank. We want some thatch and organic material because that's what make the greens receptive, but not too much thatch because it can be negative to the grass's health and playability. So my job is to open the drain on the tank just enough to moderate what gets taken out to build up the right amount of mat layer. All the while being mindful that we don't want too much thatch to build up over the summer because I can only aerify greens in the summer and we have a long golfing season ahead of us that will be adding to the tank. It's a balancing act between depleting the tank enough so it can hold all the water (thatch) until next summer when we can't aerify, while managing for playability and long term health. Basically I have to match what I remove with what gets put in, and leave a little room for expansion.


Here is a pic of a typical green's profile on our course. Notice the brown stuff or mat layer just below the grass. This is what we were missing last year when the course reopened, its the cushion that makes the greens receptive and can only be had with a little bit of age.


On the fairways this week we concentrated on heavy verti-cutting and sanding. The verti-cutitng process is the same as what we do for the greens, just much more aggressive. Check out this small video and you can see what I mean.


Here's a pic...notice how much material is flying out of the machine


As you can see, aggressive might be an understatement! Since we can't lightly verti-cut the fairways all the time like we do the greens, we have to go in an really rip them in the summer. This process removes the thatch and what I call the "bowl of spaghetti" growth habit of the grass. What I mean is that over time the grass will start to lay over and grow to be a very gnarly, tangled mess like a bowl of spaghetti. By verti-cutting the grass, all of the interwoven strings of "spaghetti" are removed allowing the grass to grow upright.

Once the fairway has been verti-cut, a large turf vacuum is used to remove all of the thatch and long runners of grass that were just cut. Once vacuumed, the fairway is mowed on last time, then blown off to prepare for the last step.


Afterward the clean up process, all of the fairways were top dressed and brushed to promote a firm surface and maintain a sandy upper profile. I had 20 truck loads of sand brought in (that's approximately 460 tons of sand) to spread over the course. The entire process took 2 ten hour days to complete.


Like the greens surface, the addition of sand to the fairway soil profile is an excellent way to maintain a high quality playing surface. Many of you remember sanding the fairways years ago to help with the very heavy accumulation of organics from the old course, and by do so now we can maintain a good firm fairway. Here is pic of a sand profile from a front 9 fairway. As you can see, it has appreciable thatch built up (the brown stuff under the grass) in just one year. This is a testament to the good growing conditions on the front 9 due to the very sandy soils and is exactly the reason for the heavy verti-cutting. The addition of sand, in combination with verti-cutting will helps break down the thatch much better.


Now here is a pic of a soil profile from the back 9 fairways and it's composition is much different. You can see it is very rocky and the thatch layer isn't as developed as the profile from the front. Again, this is attributable to the harder growing conditions on the back. I will have the back 9 fairways top dressed heavier to promote a better growing environment and hopefully a better playing surface.


During our closed week I scheduled a site visit from the area USGA Agronomist. Now that we have our new course I wanted to make sure we are on the right track to having a healthy and beautiful golf course for a long, long time. Through the USGA's Turf Advisory Service, we can have a non-biased "audit" if you will of our maintenance practices. The Agronomist reviews course conditions compared to practices and will give us recommendations or comments on what we are doing, might want to consider doing, or even what they see others doing that is successful. After the visit, the USGA will send the Club a formal report of their findings and recommendation for the us to consider. I will have the USGA in semi-annually for this service.

Here is pic of the Agronomist explaining his finding on #1 green. This is a great learning process for assistants. In the pic is my assistant Keith, Mr. Dean, Todd Lowe with the USGA, and a couple of USGA interns.


Another project I started last week was trimming palm trees. The good news is that I was fortunate to hire a former tree trimmer a while ago so I decided to tackle this project in house. The bad news is that the trees haven't been trimmed in a few years so there is a massive amount of material to trim off each tree which is making the process very slow. I was asking my trimmer how he was doing and he said that while he is trimming 50-70 trees a day now, on trees that were trimmed last year he could trim almost 100 a day.

Here you can see the one palm that is trimmed as compared to the two others that are about to be. BIG DIFFERENCE!



This pic is kinda like a "where's Waldo" picture...he's in there, I promise!


Once all of the fronds are trimmed off, my staff comes around and picks the material up and hauls it to back to my maintenance compound. All of this material will be shred on site and then reused in the mulch beds.


Lastly, this week I had scheduled to have all of the landscape enhancements finished up. That was until we received 2.5" of rain yesterday which killed any ideas of planting palm trees. The grasses will still be planted, but we will need to finish up some of the areas when it dries out due to heavy puddling in some areas.

Here are all the plants waiting to be planted


Here is some new grasses behind 3 green along the road that were just planted


Here is the new plantings on 8. As you can see, we have received some substantial rain lately


Here is a pic of the new bushes planted behind 14 green to fill in the empty spaces


Here is a pic of the right side of 16 tees


After all of the grasses are planted we will go behind and put in fresh mulch to finish dressing up the new look.

You guessed it, more rain. We are constantly checking drain lids for grass clippings that clog the drain lids


Hope your summer is going well. See ya soon!

Friday August 13, 2010

Right now, the local weather man has the easiest job on the plant. Its almost as if I'm seeing a repeat of the same news cast every evening. Its the typical late summer forecast...you know the one where he says "Today's weather is going to be hot and sticky with a huge chance of rain!" It is not uncommon when it rains for the course to get 1-3" of rain per episode, and when the recent tropical storm went by, that was everyday for almost a week.

Rain is a double edged sword. You want it to happen frequently, but no too much for too long. The affect of the all the rain isn't felt so much from all the water where you have drainage, its felt in the heavy cloud cover which reduces the intensity of the sunlight. Bermuda grass needs a minimum of 8 hours of high intensity sunlight to thrive. So when you have a long weather event, like the passing of a tropical weather system that doesn't let the sun shine, coupled with our aggressive maintenance practices, sometimes conditioning slips a little backwards in areas where you were already riding the razor's edge, or even in areas in wide open spaces.

This pic shows a small section of #10 green where the aggressive maintenance plus the heavy cloud cover for 5 consecutive days caused the turf canopy to thin out.


These areas are receiving special care to ensure they are nurtured back to health quickly and are only temporary blemishes. By raising the height of cut, increasing top dressings, and elevating fertilizer applications the small spots will disappear quickly so don't worry.

When you get rain in areas where you don't have enough drainage and the water just sits there, you get a whole lot more problems. On 15 tees, not only do we have massive shade issues,


But the tees are so perfectly flat that the water sheet flows off very slowly and ground becomes water logged for days on end. The standing water causes the grass to start rotting and thinning out. This tee was under water for almost 3 days from the continual rain fall.


To correct the issue I had the staff install some subsurface drainage on the white tee this week and we will install drainage on the red tee next week. Step one is to sod cut the drain lines. Unfortunately the sod was so rotted we had to throw it away, Normally we would save it and put it back.


Step two is to excavate the drain lines


Step three is to lay a blanket of gravel down first, install the drain pipes, and then fill the drain lines up with gravel.


Now the tee should drain adequately and I have a tree service scheduled to come in next week to work on thinning the heavy vegetation to the east of the tee to increase the sunlight.

By now many of you have seen our new fan on 15 green and have stood in front of it, appreciating the cooling effect on yourself more so than for the turf. Yet, I can tell you that the turf is also very appreciative. At this time in 2008 that green was almost dead from the intense heat and humidity back in that pocketed section of the course. I'm happy to report the grass on the green is doing great and the fan is a big hit for both players and turf. As you can see in the pics, the maintenance staff can pic the fan up with our loader and install, as well as remove it when needed.



Our landscape enhancement program continues on. Here we are installing the screening by the last house on 18. Given a little time, the hedge should fill out nicely to provide a good screen. The week of August 23 the remaining enhancements will be installed around the property. A few of the areas are #8 tee, #16 lake bank and right of the cart path, as well as some palm tree and bush installs on holes 3,4,5,10 & 18, some screen materials at the range, and maybe a few others.


Next week is aerification week so we will be extremely busy. I'll let everyone know when I update the blog afterwards so you can see what we did and all the new improvements. Stay tuned.

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.