Greens Spiking and Wetting Agent

    Yesterday we took advantage of another closed Monday and spiked greens.  Spiking greens is a less aggressive way to aerify.  The spikes go about 1 to 1.5 inches into the ground.  Although we aren't getting 4 to 5 inches down like we would with our Procore, we still get great benefits out of this. Anytime you can open up the canopy and relieve some compaction and add oxygen to the root zone is a good thing.  Behind the spiking, we used our greens roller to roll everything back smooth.  We followed our roller by making a wetting agent application. Wetting agents help keep consistent moisture across the entire green and helps drive water through the soil so our greens don't stay to wet.  Below are some pictures and a few videos of our process yesterday.  

Seasonal Color

With the golf course being so busy this past Monday and Tuesday with tournaments, we took some time to work on our flower beds around the clubhouse.  We cleaned out any old mulch that was still around from the previous year and also added a pre-emergent to hopefully help with limiting our weeds that we have to pull throughout the year.  We chose 3 different types of flowers this spring, which were petunias, lantana and impatiens.  The petunias and lantana will do great in our full sun beds that we have and the impatiens will be put where it is mostly shade.  We followed these plantings with a new layer of mulch that always makes things look great.

Mulched Areas

Over the last few weeks, our maintenance crew has been trying something new around the course. We have always had these areas on the course that are somewhat out of play but also will get the occasional golf ball landing in them.  These areas are hard to grow grass in because of either no sunlight or no sprinkler heads in the area for the irrigation that it would need.  We decided to make these areas into mulched beds.  We put up some edging around the area that we wanted to mulch that will hopefully keep the mulch in place throughout the year and also keep people from driving through these ares.  The mulch looks nice and you can also still play your golf ball off of it if you happen to hit it in there.  We have already had a few comments on what we have done so far and everything has been positive.  Here are a couple of pictures of the before and after.

Please help us take care of these areas by keeping carts away from these beds.  We have also started some sodding projects around the course.  These areas have stakes and ropes around them so please helps us keep this sod alive by staying out of the roped areas as well.

Collar Aerification

   We are back!  I haven't been doing a very good job keeping up with blog post over the past year.  Seems like once we get into our busy season it was forgotten about.  I have had several people ask about what happened to our blog and I am proud to say that we are going to start being more consistent with our blogging again.    

   Spring is well under way and our bermudagrass is finally starting to show signs of life.  Over the last two weeks the golf course has really started to green up.  As always, our shorter cut grass (collars, tees and fairways) are always to first to get going.  To help with our green up, we decided to start our aerification process this week.  We started today on our collars and will begin our tees and fairways tomorrow.  Our plan was to start everything on Monday but the rain on Sunday forced us to wait till today. This process helps us relieve any compaction and help get some needed air down through the canopy and down to the roots.  Hopefully with it being in the mid-80's on Thursday and some more chances of rain this coming weekend, we can encourage our bermudagrass to start greening up and growing.  

   We will be finished with everything by Friday afternoon and have everything cleaned up by the weekend.  I will post some pictures of our Tee and Fairway process as soon as we get started.