September - Greens Superintendent Update

 Green Superintendent Update

 

The month of August gave the course a much-needed break weather-wise—the weather patterns focused on cooler days and mornings with dew. With this, our turf has been recovering nicely from a tough July. the rough is active again and growing. It is great to see the course green again!

 

 

Aeration


 


 

The aeration process was vigorous. All green were topdressed first followed by a deep tine shown in the first photo. The deep tine machine consists of 10” tine, similar to our aeration machine. This solid tine was set to a depth of 7” to fracture compacted soil and allow oxygen deep into our root system. This also creates a deep channel for drainage. The next step was a solid tine directly over at a 2” depth at a 2.0 spacing. This also breaks up the surface compaction and adds more sand to our canopy. The more sand we add to the green complexes the better health of turf we will have. As well as consistent firm playability comes along with heavy topdressing. The last step is Fertilizer and soil amendments are brushed into aeration holes to help balance our soil profile and heal the greens quicker.



 

Our final step is to overseed the greens with new bentgrass cultivars. All greens were overseeded with the help of a tractor attachment borrowed from a fellow superintendent in the area.

 

 

Tee Aeration




 

We first started with an aggressive verticut on the tee surface. It removed an insane amount of organic matter from the canopy of the tee. We then pulled a core from the surfaces to also remove as much thatch as possible. Tees were overseeded with new bent cultivars and top dressed very heavy. Over 70 tons of sand were pumped into the tee boxes. I look to add more in the coming weeks to get our thatch under control.

 

 

 

Mainline fixes



Our main lines are a constant battle. With one of our larger 6” mainlines having a massive break on 10. We are lucky to have the in-house capabilities to deal with many varieties of mainline breaks. Our assistant Bryan has led the charge on most fixes and has done a phenomenal job.

 

 

 

New Fairway Mower




For most of the season, we have been mowing the fairways with one unit. This has been tricky but with the help of demo units from John Deere we have made it to our new unit arriving. Rob and I are constantly in contact and working on phasing out some of our older machinery to improve the quality of the cut on the golf course.

 

 

Golf Course Superintendent,

 

Cogan Register

 

 

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