Week of April 24th

 

What a week.  The weather was all over the place this week.  Chilly with 2 mornings of frost, some beautiful afternoons, a little rain on Thursday morning, the potential of big rains at the end of the week and the weekend.  The crew was crazy busy this week but (no surprise) they killed it.  

The team started off the week brushing and cutting greens continuing to work on texture.  We use the more aggressive brushes on our new rollers to stand up the grass followed by a mow.  You can really see in the above picture the brushes standing up the grass on the right side and the left side is after the mow.  

After brush cutting on greens was complete, we worked on the texture of our tees and approaches.  The team top-dressed all approaches and tees followed by verti-cutting the top-dressing in.  This will help with firmness and smoothness as well as texture.  

You will notice the rope and stakes on the first tee.  We were having some issues with standing water near the 1st tee after rain events.  We had McDonald and Sons come out this week to resolve this issue.  With big rains forecasted at the end of the week we will see if the issue is fixed.  

We had to cover up the Bermuda grass hitting area this week with the chilly temperatures and frosty mornings.  The hitting area was looking great with the warmer weather we had a couple weeks ago, so we wanted to put the covers back to protect the Bermuda grass and not set it back.  The cover will be off on Thursday with no frosty mornings in the forecast.  

We even had a surprise visitor this week.  This is John Marshall, a member of the Greens Committee, who came in at 6am on Wednesday morning for a course ride.  John was involved in our morning meeting, daily course inspection ride, Annual Bluegrass Weevil scouting, soil sampling - and he even learned how to mow a green.  We won't be putting John on payroll anytime soon but we love seeing our membership engaged in what the maintenance team does.  

The hot ticket item this week was the tree work on Wilkens Ave that was completed on Wednesday.  Logistically this was a nightmare coordinating with BGE lineman, BGE Foresters, SHA for road closures and our tree company.  Everything went smoothly and according to plan, we didn't even have our power shut down.  A huge thanks goes out to Mr. Rees for his help identifying these dangerous trees and pointing us in the right direction to get these trees removed before they caused any damage.  As you can see in some of these pictures the trees where in very bad condition and had to be removed.  

On Thursday the team focused on tasks in anticipation of heavy rain forecasted for Friday and the weekend.  They were able to fertilize all green surrounds, high traffic areas, bunker faces and bunker surrounds.  We also sprayed wetting agent/soil conditioner on fairways to help with water infiltration and soil compaction.  We continued working of Fairy Ring spraying a fungicide that needs heavy rain to come in contact with the infected area in the soil.  

Lastly, I would like to remind everyone that the new and old native areas are off limits to carts.  As you can see in the first picture (in front of the 18th fairway), there have been a lot of carts entering these areas.  In the second picture (in front of the 6th fairway), carts have been driving through the left side of this area setting this portion behind.  You will notice a difference between the area on the right which is producing its purple seed-heads and the left side which is not due to the extra traffic. 

Thanks for reading.